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This piece was originally published on Grads of Life BrandVoice on Forbes.com.

For years, the skills-first movement has focused on an important question: Can employers hire and develop talent based on what people can actually do, rather than simply where they went to school or the credentials they hold?

Increasingly, the answer is yes.

But there is a second question we need to ask: Can the skills-first movement work for the employers that make up most of the American economy?
That answer is less certain.

Much of the skills-first infrastructure developed to date, from playbooks and case studies to technology platforms and implementation guidance, has been built with large employers in mind. That doesn’t mean large employers have it easy. Many are navigating significant resource constraints and competing priorities of their own. But compared with smaller businesses, they generally have much more specialized teams and a greater capacity to absorb the complexity of changing hiring practices, adopting new technology to support shifts in the hiring lifecycle, and building sustained partnerships that help in anchoring organizational change.

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) often have fewer resources to dedicate to these efforts, even as they face many of the same talent challenges that large organizations face. And with small businesses representing 99.9% of U.S. businesses and employing 45.9% of private-sector workers, we need to start designing for the realities of these employers if the skills-first movement is going to deliver on its promise.

The next phase of the movement requires a shift from proving that skills-first approaches can work; we’ve done that already. We now need to make those approaches practical at scale. And that looks different for a company with 50,000 employees than one with 1,000, 5,000, or even 250.

Large employers tend to have more capacity (in both technology and people) to dedicate to overhauling their approach to hiring and developing talent, while also facing significantly more complexity in implementation. For a smaller business, the person responsible for hiring might also be responsible for multiple other parts of the business’ operations. Or, HR could be a team of one or two people. While this can streamline things, it also means there is little, if any, available capacity to devote to updating and implementing new talent practices.

Yet research suggests that smaller employers are not less interested in skills-first approaches. Many are in fact already using skills-first approaches even if they do not describe them that way. What they need, however, is a roadmap to help them go further.

As Isaac Agbeshie-Noye, Director at the SHRM Foundation, explains: “A small or midsize business may be eager to adopt skills-first practices but have only one HR generalist, or no dedicated HR staff, to translate that commitment into action. A small employer with 50 or fewer employees, for example, may recognize that a college degree is not necessary for a frontline supervisor role, but they lack the time and tools to identify the essential skills, revise the job description, and evaluate candidates consistently. A trusted advisory partner can close that implementation gap by helping the employer redesign a critical role, providing practical interview and assessment tools, and connecting the business with qualified talent. For SMBs, this kind of hands-on support is often what turns interest in skills-first hiring into lasting changes in practice.”

The challenge, then, isn’t convincing SMBs that skills matter. It’s building a skills-first approach, including tools and services, that fit the way they actually operate.

This is where we see a fundamental gap in the field. The skills-first movement has built a growing number of tools, credentials, assessments, and platforms, but too often assumes that employers have the blanket capacity to figure out how to connect and use them effectively.

Recent research from the Aspen Institute reinforces this point — employers have largely been treated as downstream beneficiaries rather than primary consumers whose needs should shape the ecosystem. And, for SMBs, this problem is magnified.

Consider one of the most important questions in skills-first hiring: How do you know a candidate actually has the skills they claim to have?

Employers of all sizes increasingly want validated skills — evidence that a person has demonstrated a capability, not simply listed it on a resume. Creating the infrastructure to validate skills can be one of the biggest challenges in an organization’s skills-first transformation, and the ability to do so varies significantly based on employer size.

A large company may be able to invest in plug-and-play assessments, develop its own skills frameworks, or integrate new data into its HR systems. A 200-person manufacturer or health care provider, on the other hand, may need a different model. It may rely more on external partners like community colleges, training providers, and workforce intermediaries to prepare and assess candidates, and to translate between what employers need and what education and training providers offer.

The smaller the employer, the more important the ecosystem around the employer becomes.

Yet an SMB often doesn’t have the capacity to build and sustain a network of relationships with workforce organizations, no matter how deeply engaged in their community they are. The solution, therefore, isn’t simply to tell SMBs to build more partnerships. It’s to build the connective tissue that makes those partnerships easier.

That could mean intermediaries that aggregate demand from multiple employers and create shared talent pipelines. It could mean education and training providers using more consistent ways to communicate what their programs prepare people to do. And it could mean technology that gives employers access to trusted skills signals without requiring each business to build an entire infrastructure of its own.

In other words, employers shouldn’t have to become skills-data experts to benefit from a skills-first labor market.

At Grads of Life and UpSkill America, we see this implementation gap firsthand. Employers, particularly SMBs, aren’t asking for another 75-page playbook or theoretical framework. They’re asking for a clear roadmap, opportunities to learn from peers who have successfully navigated the journey, and practical, interactive tools they can put into practice immediately. We’ve worked with employers that recognize the value of skills-first hiring but don’t know where to begin — whether that’s rewriting job descriptions, identifying the right skills to prioritize, or redesigning interview processes. Intermediaries play a critical role by curating proven practices, reducing complexity, and providing the practical guidance employers need to focus on running their businesses while still advancing their talent strategies.

But let’s be clear. The takeaway here is not that SMBs need a “lite” version of existing skills-first implementation. They need a different operating model — one in which shared infrastructure, trusted intermediaries, and common standards do more of the work that larger employers have historically been able to take on themselves.

The measure of success should no longer be how many large companies have adopted skills-first practices. It should be whether an employer with significantly fewer employees (say, 50-250) can leverage skills-first practices without needing to build a new HR function or figure out the entire ecosystem on its own.

To achieve the aspirations of this movement, we must build a skills-first system that works for the employers who make up the majority of our economy and serve almost half the workforce.

If we get that right, the payoff will extend well beyond SMBs themselves. Employers will find talent they might otherwise miss, workers will have more ways to demonstrate what they can do, and education and training providers will have clearer signals about what the economy actually needs.

The future of skills-first hiring won’t be built by Fortune 500 companies alone. It will be built through an ecosystem that gives employers of every size the confidence, tools, and support to turn good intentions into lasting practice.