Skills Management Software Archives - Skills Base

The 3 Key Metrics for Successful Skills Measurement

Nick — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 00:10:00 +0000

In today’s highly competitive market, companies are always looking for ways to stay ahead of the curve. One way to achieve this is by keeping track of your employees’ skills and investing in their professional development. Part of the skills measurement process, which we’ve previously explored more deeply, is selecting the right metrics. Metrics are measurable indicators that allow you to track your employees’ progress and make data-driven decisions.

There are a huge number of possible metrics that could be used to measure your workforce’s skills. However, try to measure too many and you risk grinding to an inevitable halt when the complexity and effort become too much. On the other hand, narrowing your list using suboptimal metrics can make your data unreliable or incomplete.

We’ve refined the range of possibilities to create the Skills Base Skill Measurement Model which includes the three most important metrics for measuring a workforce’s skills — ability, desire, and knowledge. Let’s explore how they can be used to define, measure, and track employee competency to support your company’s growth and success

Ability or Skill Level

The ‘ability’ metric refers to how well someone can apply a skill in a real-life situation. Ability should be both demonstrated and observed — demonstrated by the person being assessed in day-to-day operations, and observed by an authoritative third party who can witness and assess the skill being applied.

The key to accurately using ability as a metric is in the observation element. It’s tempting to measure it in other ways, but you’ll find they often can’t accurately determine someone’s ability to implement a given skill. For example, a 2022 study by Sackett et. al. suggests traditional signals like ‘years of experience’ are flawed predictors of someone’s actual ability. A phenomenon you’ve likely come across already. Other types of signals confuse knowledge with ability (something we talk through more below).

You should also make sure you assign a sub-metric to ability — ‘skill level’. Consider a highly trained employee versus a trainee, they might both be able to accomplish a task but one will have a vastly different skill level than the other. Without that sub-metric, there’d be no way of distinguishing between the two.

We should note here, that using a purely observational approach to skills measurement can lead to biases in your data. But, there’s a way you can counteract that. You can learn more about our Structured-Subjective approach here.

Desire or Interest Level

‘Desire’ is centered around an individual’s passion or interest for a given skill — how much they want to use that skill. When desire is high, employees are more likely to get satisfaction and enjoyment out of using their ability in a given skill. The Japanese principle of Ikigai refers to this as a feeling of accomplishment and fulfillment that follows when people pursue their passions. On the contrary, someone with a low level of desire will be more reluctant to use their ability and may actually feel dissatisfied when using it.

Desire is a leading indicator of the sustainability of skills within an organization. There’s a risk of burnout when people aren’t passionate about their work and are tired of completing tasks they don’t enjoy. There’s also a risk of “quiet quitting” — a recently named trend where disillusioned employees clock in simply to do the bare minimum they need to do to get paid. Both of these risks will ultimately lead to low productivity and high employee turnover.

We apply the sub-metric ‘interest level’ to measure an employee’s desire to use their skills. When combined with ability, it’s possible to create a workforce that enables people to work on things they both love and are good at.

Knowledge or Qualifications

Don’t fall into the trap — knowledge isn’t ability.

‘Knowledge’ specifically relates to someone’s theoretical understanding of something rather than their experience in implementing it. For example, a flying enthusiast may have extensively studied the subject of how to fly an airplane, and may even be incredibly knowledgeable about it, but, if they’ve never actually flown a plane before, would you want to be their first passenger?

In saying that, knowledge does still play an important part in assessing an employee’s skills. It provides the theory, understanding, tools and techniques needed to effectively apply a skill in a real-world situation.

To measure someone’s knowledge, look at their qualifications and certifications, including any evidence of the completion of training, mentoring, or coaching. These artifacts are an objective measure of the knowledge someone has gained and are binary — either you have them or you don’t. This is unlike both ability and desire which are measured on a scale.

Using these metrics in conjunction with each other will help you effectively and efficiently measure your employee’s competencies. If you’d like skills assessment software to help manage and track these competencies then get in touch today.

The post The 3 Key Metrics for Successful Skills Measurement appeared first on Skills Base.

Better Learning Outcomes Through Skills Management

Nick — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 03:14:15 +0000

There are thousands of ways to train and upskill your workforce but doing it in a way that helps both the organization and the individual is a little more complex, particularly for teams in rapidly evolving fields like technology, engineering, and advanced manufacturing. With the half-life of perishable skills at barely 2.5 years, teams must constantly learn and upskill to be productive, competitive, and happy.

The question becomes: Is it possible to create better learning outcomes for your people that; close their unique skill gaps, can be linked to desires and career pathways, and can be measured and data-driven?

To create highly productive learning, it needs to be agile and measured; this is where skills management comes in.

Looking at learning through the lens of skills

Every person has unique skills DNA, so why do we force them into training that might be too broad, untargeted, or not fit for purpose? It leads to worse training experiences for the individual and also a lower ROI on your overall L&D investment.

Taking a skills lens to your learning experiences is about going deeper than the job or role. Instead, you are focusing on the skills that the organization requires from the individual to do the work at hand and that the organization demands from the workforce in the future. But most importantly, you are recognizing the skills each individual has now, needs help with, and is interested in developing throughout their careers.

However, skills can’t sit in isolation. They need to have strong contextual relationships with your organization, its teams, roles, and office locations, and for the purposes of this article, training.

You also require a proven methodology for measuring your people and one that can scale and ultimately create a unified understanding of skill and competency levels.

A skills management platform brings these areas together. To complement existing learning technologies but provide the lens of skills needed to deliver better learning outcomes.

Visualizing and understanding skill gaps

Knowing skill gaps differs from identifying and prioritizing which ones to focus on. This is where good data is essential, as it gives you clear information about where there are strengths and opportunities to upskill staff, allowing L&D managers to create data-driven decisions around what people need to focus on in their learning.

By visualizing your people’s skill gaps, you can better communicate their learning pathways and areas for investment. And how do you get good data? Through good tools and processes.

4 ways skills can be used to support learning interventions

By using skills data to drive learning outcomes and experiences, you enable a greater ability to access the entire talent pool within your organization. Skills management software makes it easier to quickly search your teams and organization for people with specific gaps or strengths. There are four key ways such tools and data can help:

Online Training & Courses

The appropriate data is much easier to find and select the proper training and courses to upskill your people. Organizations should be able to link individual skill gaps to microlearning opportunities from any online platform like Udemy, Linkedin, Redhat, or internal documentation.

Mentoring & Coaching

Skills data can help organizations find the right mentors and leaders for others. By understanding an individual’s skill gaps, organizations can match those gaps to someone in the business with the right skill strengths.

Career Pathing

Employees expect managers and organizations to invest in their long-term Career development. Doing so leads to a win-win situation: where you’re retaining staff while helping them to thrive. You can’t simply look at the skill gaps that exist now but the skill gaps for future roles while providing actionable learning opportunities to reach that goal.

Learning Content Strategy

As a training or learning manager, discovering the content that needs to be created can be daunting. Through skills management, you can work to align your content strategy to develop fit-for-purpose materials that genuinely close the most critical skill gaps of your teams and organization.

Measuring learning outcomes and ROI

While training staff is essential, it loses much of its value if you aren’t measuring the outcome. It is crucial to understand the days, weeks, and months following training to determine learning outcomes and how competent someone may be.

To best measure the outcome and ROI of training, you should set up a dynamic skills assessment process that looks to re-measure skill levels after an individual has had some time to apply a skill. Organizations can better measure the ROI of training by understanding skill and competency level changes of a given time and relating that back to specific training interventions.

From there, you can better determine what is working and what isn’t and pivot where necessary.

Ultimately, this ensures you create an environment that supports and enriches employees, so they are engaged, learning, and happy, resulting in retention, productivity, and better work overall.

Choosing the right skills management software

There are a few things you need to look for in skills management software to best support training and learning interventions. At a fundamental level, you should consider if the software has a way to:

Track and manage skills
Measure skills
Visualize skills
Link skill gaps to training
Re-measure skills in a fast and dynamic way.

Now is the time to get started. Talk to the team and learn more about best practices surrounding your learning and development strategy and how you embed skills management into your decisions.

The post Better Learning Outcomes Through Skills Management appeared first on Skills Base.

Why Every Tech Team Needs to Invest in Skills Management

Nick — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 05:02:58 +0000

Unemployment is at an all time low and the US economy has added 428,000 new jobs. Yet over the last few months, the technology sector in markets around the world have been consistently laying off staff; with more than 38,000 people laid off in the US alone.

Technology teams and organizations are at a crossroads. On one hand, they are being forced to cut staff and development spending for their teams, while on the other, also being asked to continue to deliver on the work at hand. This opens up a bunch of questions around how to best move forward:

Do I still have the people with the right skills to do the job at hand?
During a hiring freeze, how do I know what skills I truly need to recruit for?
If I can’t recruit, who can I invest in internally to develop and solve customer problems?
What do I need to do to create opportunities for individualized career development?
How can I ensure I’m retaining the people I still have?

Tech leaders need to be data-driven in their decision making – and it starts and ends with changing the lens from jobs, to skills.

Here’s where skills management comes in. A tool that removes dependence on spreadsheets and out-of-date data while empowering you with a centralized location for skills insights. This helps you understand skill gaps, skill strengths, and skill interests amongst your people.

Here are a few critical reasons why as a technology leader, you need to invest in skills management.

Team upskilling and reskilling

You need to make the most of your training budget, and ensure a defensible position for additional investment that’s ruthlessly focused on measurable ROI. The reality is that each person in your team is at a different stage of their development. Each person has their own interests and desires, and each form of training needs to be tailored to the skill gaps of the individual.

By investing in skills management, you invest in your workforce. Rather than pushing long expensive courses on your team, you can understand each individual skill gap, and assign micro-targeted courses to get them up to speed. You can then observe the application of specific training, to see what’s working and what isn’t.

It’s not just upskilling and reskilling. It’s right-skilling.

Check out how we assign training material to specific skill gaps >

Team growth and mobility

The notion of the vertical career path is dead – and for good reason. With average tenure at historic lows, and career development being a major factor for retention, you need to give your people the opportunity to grow and thrive. It’s not just a factor of promotion within their current roles, but understanding where skill adjacencies lie and interests lie.

Let’s say there is a marketing gun in your organization who is fascinated by web development, HTML5, CSS and all things front-end. They have shown interest in development and are losing interest in the marketing function. By understanding these granular skills insights you can be proactive in giving that person opportunities to join the development team rather than that person leaving with their years of domain expertise.

The magic is that Skills Management lets you see the whole person, not just the title.

Check out how we provide insights into different career pathways >

Team focus

When revenue is on the table, or new product functionality is being added, you need to ensure you have the right people, with the right skills, solving the problem at hand. By focusing on skills insights, you aren’t just looking into the gaps, and interests, but instead you are seeing the whole picture of the strengths and attributes of your workforce both across the team and for each individual

Let’s say you have a geographically dispersed field service team that you deploy to customer locations and sites. In time sensitive and high-value situations you need to ensure that you have the right skill set at your customer location. Skills Management software gives you the granular control to analyze your workforce, build teams and actively deploy people as you see fit.

Reduce risk and deliver better customer outcomes.

Check out how you can find skilled people in real-time >

Team resilience

Technology leaders and managers don’t just have to solve the work today, but understand how to remain competitive in the future – as new technologies are deployed, and potential risks are uncovered.

Let’s say that over the next 24 months you are investing in your product suite to enable Machine Learning insights for your user base. You are still unsure about what investment has to be made from a talent acquisition perspective to reach this goal. By identifying the skills you need, and then measuring your existing team, you can begin to gather the insights necessary to support not just hiring, but the development of internal candidates.

Are you ready to help your tech team thrive?

Today’s employees have different expectations and are more open to reviewing their options. Having a laser focus on skills builds trust between employee, manager and employer. The skills data acts as a source of truth to support collaboration. By creating a skills based team, staff can feel confident things are working and their career is developing.

Are you ready to help your tech team sit at the forefront of the industry? Regularly assessing skill and competency levels across your workforce with Skills Base can help. We work with technical teams every day and understand how important managing employee skills and competencies is, so get in touch to see how we can help!

Ask us how Technology Teams are using Skills Base

The post Why Every Tech Team Needs to Invest in Skills Management appeared first on Skills Base.

Skills Management & Workforce Planning – A Match Made In Heaven

Nick — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 04:09:10 +0000

Ongoing innovation and business agility are imperative in today’s competitive world. Organizations must continuously evolve to keep up, shifting from understanding work in terms of fixed, static jobs, to a dynamic landscape of skills which can be deployed and acted on as needed.

Instead of putting someone on a project based on reporting lines or roles, staff are matched with projects that fit their interests and skills. Rather than looking at job postings or reaching out to their networks, staff are served customized opportunities based on their unique skill set. Leaders and managers get real-time insight into the skills makeup of their workforce and how this can impact work processes and business outcomes.

This is a people-centric future that means better outcomes for the business, teams and each individual person.

But how can you actually start applying a skills-based approach to workforce planning?

It all begins with embracing skills management

Skills Management and skills management software is all about understanding the skills of your workforce in a transparent, scalable way. Measuring those skills through a structured subjective assessment process, and then acting on the skill gaps and strengths of your workforce.

For workforce skill gaps, it’s all about how they can be closed. This might be through learning and development, training, or mentoring.
For workforce skill strengths, it’s all about how you can allocate those people to work, so that they are happy and your customers are happy.

Let’s say one of your major customers comes to you wanting to migrate their on-premise infrastructure to the cloud. You want to make sure you’re keeping this customer happy and want your A-team on it. Unfortunately, someone has left the business, another is on holiday. How do you find people from across your organization to fill in the skill gaps of this project?

You don’t want to trawl through CVs, and everyone is now working remotely so it’s hard to quickly ask around the office. With Skills Management software at your fingertips, managers can now have a central location to source skilled employees from.

By focusing on skills, employees that might have fallen through the cracks could be given an opportunity to join a project or team they might not have been able to in the past, allowing them to use their skill set to its fullest and giving you the best person for the job.

A win-win situation.

Finding skilled workers in real-time

That all sounds great, but what might it actually look like?

When you have your data in order, finding the right skilled employee becomes easy. All you have to do is search for the criteria that meets your objective.

In this example, I am looking for someone in my organization that is:

Skilled in assembly efficiency
Skilled in equipment maintenance
And is based out of Sydney, Australia.

In seconds, I should be able to find who meets these targets, and who might be a close match.

Are you interested to see how you can begin applying skills management to your strategic workforce planning? Now is the time to book in a demo of Skills Base, and discuss your requirements with the knowledgeable team today.

Learn what Skills Base can do for you

The post Skills Management & Workforce Planning – A Match Made In Heaven appeared first on Skills Base.

How Skills Management is Changing Learning and Development for the better

Nick — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 13:00:08 +0000

The “Great Resignation” – something we have all been discussing around the world for well over a year. Whether you think it is a real problem or not, there is still something to be said for the idea that even knowledgeable workers are quitting from burnout or a sympathy with the budding anti-work movement.

In fact, workers are leaving their jobs at historic rates, with a record 4.5 million people resigning in November 2021 (The Guardian). This exodus is not just causing issues with the bottom line of a business, but creating unprecedented knowledge gaps across teams and organizations. Gaps that are often left unknown until it’s too late.

The question has to be asked for learning and development professionals: how can we better support people to thrive within their jobs? How can we move the needle and give more opportunities for people to grow in their careers and vocations? This is where Learning and Development (L&D) plays a crucial role and can further help to empower people.

It’s not just about creating content, or learning opportunities. It’s about understanding the goals of people, where their skill gaps and interests lie, and then act on this in a meaningful and bespoke way for each employee.

The changing nature of Learning and Development

Since 2020, L&D has changed a lot. The first hurdle was overcoming the virtual nature of the workplace and how to train a workforce remotely. In 2021, this evolved further, with L&D teams pivoting to implementing strategies that train and engage remote workers by using a blended learning approach. With this in mind, there are several areas L&D planning should be focused on in 2022:

Agile learning – flexible, agile learning strategies have been a focus for many years but as our workspaces change, it has never been more important. New technologies are shaping the needs for businesses and people alike. Different people require different learning opportunities, and agile learning must be measured in a data-driven way. Not simply based on course completion, but genuine skill trends and career progression.
Matching a hybrid environment – As organizations embrace different working environments; fully remote, full office work, hybrid work, or a rise in a contract-based workforce, learning strategies need to adapt as well. The goals of people, their skill levels, and skill interests can no longer stay in the heads of managers. The data needs to be transparent, accessible and actionable for each person.
Transforming learning culture – The concept of learning is not linear and can’t be acted on in an ad hoc way. A team and organizational culture must be met with lifelong learning that not only meets the goals of a business, but each individual person. This requires skills data to underpin a learning strategy, learning investment and employee development.
Sharing the impact of training – While valued, L&D can be considered a cost center by many leaders and it is important to demonstrate the value and performance benefits of training staff. Recognition of highly competent staff should be linked to performance reviews, Skills should be linked to actual work within an organization, opportunities should exist for elite employees to mentor up and coming staff and the only way to do this is to measure skill levels and interest levels, track skill trends and then act on skill gaps.

L&D in 2022 is all about putting skills at the heart of your learning and development decision making in a way that helps drive employees and see the business succeed. Every learning and development professional needs to embrace skills management to compliment strategy and workforce development.

Skills Management Supercharges Learning and Development

Skills management is all about identifying, measuring, and acting on the skills data within your organization. It is a foundational toolset to quickly see the skills of a person or workforce, where there are skills gaps, where people need upskilling, and what this all means for the organization’s bottom line.

For people, transparency around skills and skill trends means that L&D can be kept honest. Having data to underpin the necessary learning opportunities means that employees and managers work collaboratively to find upskilling and reskilling pathways. Performance reviews are no longer “hearsay” but a discussion on how and where to improve.
A team’s view of skills allows L&D managers to see where skill gaps lie, and act in a proactive and effective way to close skill gaps, and be ahead of the curve.
Having a clear focus on skills across an organization means that L&D managers can pinpoint gaps in their learning strategy, and then utilize skill gap data to support the acquisition of additional investment. It also provides a clear representation to the executive team on what skills are needed in the future to ensure the organization retains a competitive advantage.

With skills data front and center, that’s transparent, accessible and actionable, L&D professionals can truly become data-driven – taking a seat at the executive table.

Why Skills Base should be your top pick

Hundreds of learning and development professionals already utilize Skills Base to enhance their decision making efforts. It is also recognized as a top 100 learning and development tool in 2021, as well as a learning and development tool to watch in 2022 – not because it’s a learning platform, but a skills management platform that compliments L&D efforts.

Complement your learning and development efforts and give Skills Base a go – contact us for a tour or get started for free today.

The post How Skills Management is Changing Learning and Development for the better appeared first on Skills Base.