Skills Gap Archives - Skills Base https://www.skills-base.com/tag/skills-gap Skills Base Mon, 19 Feb 2024 00:56:38 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://www.skills-base.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/cropped-Skills-Base-Website-Icon-32x32.png Skills Gap Archives - Skills Base https://www.skills-base.com/tag/skills-gap 32 32 184397392 Skills Gap Analysis Checklist and Timeline https://www.skills-base.com/skills-gap-analysis-checklist Mon, 16 Oct 2023 23:47:11 +0000 https://www.skills-base.com/?p=10078 You’re getting towards the end of the year, planning performance reviews, finalizing investment and strategizing, but there’s one critical piece…

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You’re getting towards the end of the year, planning performance reviews, finalizing investment and strategizing, but there’s one critical piece missing.

You know you have to hire a bunch of new staff next year, you know that your team is eager to upskill and progress their careers. You know that you need to provide better support for new hires, but you’re missing that key snippet of information.

A clear, accessible view of employee, team and organization-wide skill gaps (and strengths!).

Luckily for you, we’re here with a 7 point checklist to kickstart your skills gap analysis.

And one of the biggest takeaways? Get started now, so you’re ready to act with confidence in the new year.

The Skills Gap Analysis Process

The following process is meant to support your team and organization in how to perform a skills gap analysis.

An image showing the 7 different aspects of an effective Skills Gap Analysis process
  1. Define an organization-authored assessment methodology 

    An organization-authored assessment is a common framework that helps ensure that all employees are assessed equally and consistently. This improves both fairness and accuracy, and facilitates the ability to effectively compare entities such as employees, teams, roles and locations.

    💡We suggest using a structured-subjective™ approach which brings together the best of objective, and subjective assessment methodologies to create a scalable, and truly effective model to perform assessments and capture high quality data.

  2. Create a fit-for-purpose skills inventory

    A skills inventory is a centralized and structured database of skills data, qualifications and employee attributes that helps to create a unified understanding of skills within an organization.

    💡It’s best to keep your skills inventory in a structured way so that the needs of your organization are met and that subjective overlap or ambiguity in defining skills is managed and determined by the organization itself.

  3. Add context and groupings to skills data

    Skills shouldn’t sit in isolation, but rather should be mapped to all the necessary entities within your organization. It’s all about being as relevant as possible, and putting in the effort early to get the desired, longer term results.

    💡By grouping skills by job function or organizational structure, the organization can achieve a suitable level of specificity without generating surplus amounts of data which can also overwhelm employees and result in a degraded level of accuracy.

  4. Provide a fixed, universal numeric rating scheme

    A fixed universal numeric rating scheme declares an organization-wide, standardized methodology for measuring ability that will apply to all employees, and all skills, creating a level playing field and ensuring all data is compatible. This allows data to be combined, compared, and “slice and diced” in any direction.

    💡Standardising a rating scheme that can be applied universally ensures that the structure will always be able to adapt to the changing needs and skills of the organization into the future.

  5. Specify the criteria for each rating via a detailed description

    Defining a detailed criteria for each rating within the organizational rating scheme guides employees in their assessments by providing a set of rules and references.

    💡Some criteria that Skills Base have used include Level of knowledge (eg: Self trained, real-world experience, formal training), Ability to train others, Ability to explain subjects, Ability to sell, install, configure or maintain products, Years of experience.

  6. Conduct an employee self-assessment

    An employee-conducted self-assessment provides first-hand data of the employee’s perceived abilities. This method not only provides an accurate “first-cut” of information, it also significantly reduces the effort, time and administration required in establishing a skills management repository by distributing the data entry load amongst all employees. This results in rapid results that are both current and accurate.

    💡Communicate the value of self assessments to your employees. It’s not about micromanaging or a waste of their time. The results from their skills assessment provides a data baseline to give them more power in conversations with managers and the organization as a whole — on training, L&D, projects and much more

  7. Perform an additional, supervisor-conducted assessment

    A second supervisor-conducted skills assessment of the employee serves to review, verify and validate the employee responses. The supervisor responses should not generally be used to override the employee’s, but rather combine to achieve a weighted assessment. This serves to further increase the accuracy of the data.

    💡Make sure supervisors and managers take the time to provide commentary on any differences in scores given. Additional relevance can add to more constructive feedback and experiences for each employee.

Skills Gap Analysis Checklist and Timeline

Becoming a skills based team or organization can be a daunting task. When starting from scratch we suggest beginning smaller– focusing on a team, or a department within your organization. From there you can prove the ROI and outcomes, manage change and then expand broader across your organization.

As we head into the end of 2021, here is a quick high level timeline that you can think about working to. It’s worth noting that each and every business and team will be at different stages.

Did you know that Skills Base is free for anyone to use up to 25 people and 250 skills? Click here to create your account today and get off those spreadsheets!

Week 1 to 2 - Creating a skills inventory

The first two weeks of your timeline should be dedicated to getting your skills data right. Make sure that your skills inventory is relevant, has the right naming structures, descriptions and that your workforce will understand.

Week 3 to 4 - Create data relationships and rhythms

The next two weeks should be about ensuring that any data relationships are correct. Skills should be correctly linked to the right people, teams, roles, and office locations to ensure that you can properly perform skills gap analysis at a later date.

In this time, you also want to begin communicating the value to your team. Letting them know what is coming, what to expect and the outcomes of the assessment process. Take them along for the journey!

Week 4 to 6 - Invite and perform initial assessments

After your setup and configuration is complete, now is the time to sit back and invite your selected teams to begin their assessments. The goal here is to continue communicating value to ensure a very high completion rate.

Week 7 - Analyze results of first assessment

When the assessment data is in, now you’re ready to start analyzing the results and understand your skills gaps. If you’re lucky enough to be using Skills Base, these insights can be automatically displayed at an individual, team, location, role or organization-wide level.

Week 8 and beyond - Keep it going!

After building the cadence for your first assessment process, it’s important that you keep it going to the rhythms of your business. The more assessment data points you get, the more detailed insights you can get on changes in an individual’s skill levels, gaps across teams, or across your business

Whether you’re starting from scratch or you’ve already got an established skills inventory, it can seem like a lot to do. Don’t worry, we’re here to help. If you need to get started on your skills gap analysis, schedule a demo with the team today.

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]]> 10078 How a Top 4 global accounting firm is tackling the Cyber Security Skills Gap https://www.skills-base.com/how-a-top-4-global-accounting-firm-is-tackling-the-cyber-security-skills-gap Thu, 02 Jun 2022 05:00:39 +0000 https://www.skills-base.com/?p=11219 The US-based Cyber Security division at one of the largest global accounting and professional services firms has been growing at…

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The US-based Cyber Security division at one of the largest global accounting and professional services firms has been growing at an unprecedented rate. From hundreds of employees a few years ago, to over a thousand in 2021.

It was the North American Cyber division Principal that advocated a skills-based approach within the organization. His goal was to find a way to measure, track, and report on skills data in a scalable and agile way to better understand the Cyber Security team’s skill gaps and strengths.

Before implementing Skills Base, a spreadsheet-based tool was used to track skills, and evaluate employees on their competencies. But as their skills taxonomy continued to grow at an exponential rate and a more dynamic and granular approach to skills tracking was needed, spreadsheets couldn’t keep up.

“Skills Base hits the sweet spot in tracking the granularity of skills needed, in a scalable and dynamic way to keep up with the pace of the Cyber Security industry”

Principal, Cyber Security

Having a centralized view of skills data across the division has meant that Cyber Security skills gaps and strengths can be easily analyzed and reported on. This means that it has become a key data source for supporting many people-driven business decisions from hiring and recruitment, training, and internal mobility through to resource allocation.

“The way we’re now tracking and managing skills data is being used to make critical business decisions. We wouldn’t be able to do what we’re doing now strategically without Skills Base and a skills-based approach.“

Principal, Cyber Security

There were a few “must-haves” when it came to selecting a skills management tool. It needed to be a cloud based solution which implemented globally leading security and data management measures. It needed to work on any device and provide an intuitive interface for employee skill evaluations. It needed to support Single Sign On through Microsoft Active Directory and easily integrate with the existing SAP Success Factors tech stack.

With the successful implementation of Skills Base and subsequent onboarding of employees, the Cyber Security division has been able to achieve significant outcomes across 5 key areas of the business.

Hiring at Scale to close the cyber security skills gap

As the business has gone through exponential growth, there simply weren’t enough people in the organization to upskill, or reskill. By using Skills Base to help identify the Cyber Security skills gap within the organization, they have been able to provide hyper-targeted skill requirements to the HR and talent selection teams.

“We’re using Skills Base to support the hiring of another 100 staff to support our rapid growth. The data is helping me go to my executive team to justify the expense and more importantly the skills needed for the business to remain competitive, and resilient.“

Principal, Cyber Security

Using skill strengths to deliver more customer value

The consulting division is another rapidly growing part of the organization. Many existing customers, and new customers rely on the Cyber Security team to provide cutting edge innovation across strategy, cloud migration, risk mitigation, and much more.

The experience management team is in charge of understanding customer requirements, and then finding people within the organization to deliver projects at the highest quality. Before Skills Base, the team would have to trawl through CVs that might be five years old or rely on the knowledge of certain managers.

Skills Base has helped to reduce the sense of “tribal knowledge”. Rather than the understanding of skills being locked away in individuals’ heads, managers now have a central location to source skilled, Cyber Security candidates from.

“Our Experience management team can now find the granular skills of our Cyber Security team needed to win more contracts and deliver the cutting edge innovation our customers expect from us.“

Principal, Cyber Security

Skills Base has provided a skills-based approach to resource allocation that can identify the latest skills in the Cyber Security practice at the granularity needed to deliver the cutting edge innovation for their customers.

Targeted Training to Close the Cyber Security Skill Gap

The Cyber Security team has consistently been committed to training and learning and development. This has not only been to improve the employee experience and career outcomes, but also ensure that the division has the skilled professionals required to deliver on the business strategy.

“We’ve been able to understand the skills gaps of our technical areas, and collaboratively work with our team to better define their training requirements for the job, and for future business skill needs.“

Principal, Cyber Security

Skills Base has allowed the Cyber Security team to become more focused in their training efforts. A detailed understanding of skills has helped to create training pathways that are bespoke to each employee. These trends can then be objectively discussed during performance reviews so that employees and managers can be held accountable in an objective way.

Training Investment strategy aligned to the skill gaps

The executive team understands and supports the need to have the right skills in the business now, and an understanding of the skills needed for future success.

With Skills Base, the Cyber Security leaders are able to benchmark the current skills profile of the organization, and then use that data to support budget planning across training, recruitment and L&D.

“I am able to link the revenue generating project skill needs, with the competency levels across the Cyber Security division. This shows the skills gaps, and gives me the data needed to secure an adequate training budget.”

Principal, Cyber Security

This has not only provided another data point to support an increase in investment, but can be directly aligned to strategy and improving business success.

Employee experience & Internal Mobility

In some cases employees within the Cyber Security team were overlooked when it came to their skill set and interests to develop in certain areas. They would often stick to what they were hired for, and be restricted by their degrees or qualifications.

Skills Base has allowed more visibility into not only the skill levels, but also the skill interests of each employee. This means that people have more control over their own progression within the Cyber Security practice.

This has not only driven greater diversity across the talent pool, it has also created opportunities to move freely within the practice area and create cross functional teams.

“We can find the needle in the haystack. Now, we can support employees better, give them the training they want, and give them opportunities that are more meaningful to them.“

Principal, Cyber Security

Visibility in skills has also opened the doors to greater collaboration across the business where it’s easier to find mentors and coaches who are skilled in certain areas.

It's time to understand, measure and act on your cyber security skill gaps.

Chat to the team today

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]]> 11219 Identify Skill Gaps Faster with the new Competency Analysis Chart https://www.skills-base.com/identify-skill-gaps-faster-with-the-new-competency-analysis-chart Mon, 05 Apr 2021 03:19:27 +0000 https://www.skills-base.com/?p=6209 Have you ever wanted an easier way to find top skill areas for development and investment, or gain valuable insights…

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Have you ever wanted an easier way to find top skill areas for development and investment, or gain valuable insights into the capabilities of the different segments of your workforce?

We’re excited to announce a new way for Skills Base Enterprise license holders to rapidly identify and visualize skill and competency gaps.

In addition to the trusted real-time Skills Matrix and skills matrix reporting functionality there is now an additional option to see and plot skill and competency levels on a bubble chart.

Skill Competency Analysis Screen Shot

Using the new chart you can drill down through each skill category to isolate and analyze specific groups of skills within an entity (team, role or location). And, the chart can also be configured to display data based on skill targets assigned to the viewed entity, or individuals’ targets which could come from any source.

The chart is also accompanied by the raw data which can be viewed and sorted easily.

How do I interpret the Skill Competency Analysis Chart?

This visual representation facilitates rapid identification of gaps and strengths, as well as the volume of skills across different parts of the organization. For more detailed information visit the knowledge base article on this new feature.

Interpreting Competency Level – Bubbles towards the right mean higher competency level, whereas towards the left means a lower competency level

Competency Level Analysis

Interpreting Skill Level – Higher bubbles mean higher skill level while lower bubbles mean lower skill level.

Skill Level Analysis

Interpreting Skill Volume – Larger Bubbles mean more people with skills, smaller bubbles mean less people with the skill.

Skill Volume Analysis

Interpreting Competency Volume – Green bubbles mean many people are fully competent while Red bubbles mean fewer people are fully competent.

Competency Volume Analysis

How do I get access to this new feature?

The new Skill Competency Analysis chart is available to all Enterprise license holders. If you need help setting it up for your organization feel free to reach out to talk to the team. 

If you are currently on a free or self-service licence, schedule a demo with the team to see if it’s something that might be of use for your organization.

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]]> 6209 Skills Management 2020 Feature Updates in Review https://www.skills-base.com/skills-management-2020-feature-updates-in-review Thu, 10 Dec 2020 00:36:57 +0000 https://www.skills-base.com/?p=5153 As things start to quieten down for the holiday period, we wanted to take the time to show you the…

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As things start to quieten down for the holiday period, we wanted to take the time to show you the amazing features that the Skills Base community has helped us create this year.

One evident observation across the industries and organizations that we deal with is clear focus on skills.

In June, we saw Microsoft launch a global initiative to help 25 million people improve their digital competencies. In August, we saw Google announce a ground-breaking new skills and certification initiative set to disrupt college degrees. And we have seen governments across the globe announcing major investments to enable the rapid transition to skill-led economies. What’s more, this transition has been accelerated by the COVID-driven shift to remote work.

It’s crystal clear that effective skill management is no longer a nice-to-have. Skills are now the atomic element of every business and every business’ skill management strategy. And that strategy needs to be more powerful, more efficient and more agile than spreadsheets or directories full of PDFs.

Over the last year, we’ve been fortunate enough to work closely with our growing, global customer base to improve their skills management experience. This means we’ve been able to provide a constantly improving cloud-based platform that puts employee skills at the heart of decision making.

We appreciate the input of the Skills Base community, and we’re excited to show you the amazing features that you’ve helped us create this year! Make sure to follow us on Linkedin and Twitter to stay updated on new features, case studies and news.

Jump to the updates you want to read

Skills Inventory Updates for 2020

Improvements to your skills inventory and database

Your skills inventory (or skills database) is one of the most important parts of Skills Base. It’s where your skills data resides. This year we’ve focused on giving you more visibility into this data while enabling you to build additional relationships between the data and your people to help you make better-informed, faster decisions. Here is a quick sample of some of those improvements.

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Implemented the new Interactive Skills Matrix within the employee dashboard

Read more >
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Added the ability to export your people directory

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Added the new "My Team" navigation menu item

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Added the option to set individual employee competency targets

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Added the ability to assign custom fields to skills data

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Added the ability to assign multiple roles to employees

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Added the ability to overwrite view permissions within the people finder

Do you need even stricter control over your data and who sees what in Skills Base? This update gives you even more options to build on your data security.
WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Talk to the Skills Base team now. Schedule a live demo

Schedule a live demo
Skills Assessment & audit Updates for 2020

Improvements to your skills audits and assessments

Auditing and assessing the competency of skills is key to any successful skills management approach. This is where the human element really comes in and you need everyone to be involved and motivated. This year we’ve focused on; a) giving you greater control to link assessment dates with your business needs, b) the ability to control who views and performs assessments, and c) we’ve given you the tools to prompt your team when assessments are due. And more…

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Improved the ability to customize the assessment requirements for employees and supervisors

Read more >
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Added in overall comments to assessment history

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Added in the ability to export employee and supervisor assessments with comments

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Added in the ability to set fixed assessment dates

Better align the skills audit and assessment process with the cadence of your team and organization.
Read more >
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Added the ability to notify employees via email to take self-assessments

Get your employees and teams assessed sooner by notifying them when their assessment is upcoming and due.
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Added the ability to perform partial assessments for employees via roles

Do you have employees that belong to different teams? This is a powerful new feature that works along side the new "multiple roles" feature and gives you the ability to better control skills audit outcomes.
Skills Reporting Updates for 2020

Improvements to your skills reporting

What good is data if you can’t do anything with it? We’ve worked hard to give you all the tools you need to make decisions within Skills Base, and extract the data you need to perform additional analysis. Whether it’s finding your skills gap, hiring, learning and development, investment planning, or project management, the Skills Data gives you the ability to make better-informed, data-driven decisions. Here are just some of this year’s improvements.

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Added direct links to the heat matrix & capability matrix reports from your dashboards

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Dashboard report links will now respect user's saved preferences

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Added new skills category level dashboards

Read more >
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Added the ability to select multiple teams in the heat matrix report

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Added the new competency heat matrix report

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Added the ability to export team level data

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Added the ability to export skill assignment data

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Added the ability to export skill level targets

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Added the "last login" field to the report builder workflow

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Added the functionality to filter "report builder reports" by person

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Added the ability to export your Skills Matrix to Excel and .csv

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Added the option to edit saved reports

“With Skills Base we no longer see career development in a traditional vertical sense. Having the skills data readily available for anyone, staff can select roles they’re interested in and can progress towards them horizontally and diagonally, giving them a lot more freedom and control over their own career journey.’
Vodafone Case Study
Andy Hamilton
Training and Development Manager, Vodafone Retail NZ
Qualifications Updates for 2020

Improvements to your qualifications and certifications

Qualifications are an integral part of truly measuring employee competency. This year we’ve worked hard to embed a more robust qualification module within Skills Base (check out the knowledge base here). If you have any feedback or additions you were looking for, reach out and let us know but here are some enhancements you asked for and we delivered.

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Added the option to set expiry notifications for qualifications

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You can now add attachments to qualifications

Integrations & APi Updates for 2020

Improvements to your APIs, Integrations and SSO

Your skills management platform can’t sit in isolation. This is why Skills Base was built from the ground up with REST APIs and Single Sign On (SSO) connectors in mind. From HR Systems (HRIS), Project Management Tools, and Learning and Development platforms, we’re always interested to learn about the other tools you have in place so we can learn how to better integrate and make your experience with Skills Base better. 

Do you have a suggestion for a specific integration? Reach out and let us know.

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Added the ability to edit qualifications assignments via API

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Added the ability to update skill levels via the API

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Added the ability to trigger a workflow when when ratings are updated via the API

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You can now view the status of SSO certificates via the Skills Base UI

Infrastructure Updates for 2020

Improvements to the Skills Base global infrastructure

With customers around the world of varying sizes, and in many private and government organizations, we’ve put in a lot of effort this year to further enhance a safe, secure and globally scalable platform.

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Major Database Upgrades

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Major Global Infrastructure Upgrades

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Major Skills Base Deployment Process Upgrades

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Major Global Infrastructure Reporting Upgrades

What's else is new in 2020?

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Added new language preferences

You can now instantly change between German, English (UK) and English (US) within your profile options.
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Added the ability to filter columns within tables

You can now better understand your bulk data within Skills Base by filtering columns based on what you're looking for.
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Added the ability to change the default landing page for employees

Looking to improve your teams first time experience? Send them to the right page within Skills Base.
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Added opt-in functions for future Skills Base feature updates

Interested in staying up-to date with everything new in Skills Base for 2021? You can now opt in to our monthly feature updates from within your account settings.

Help us make Skills Base even better in 2021

We have some big plans for Skills Base in 2021. Make sure to stay in the loop by signing up to feature notifications, follow us on Linkedin and Twitter, and keep providing your feedback!

Enjoy the rest of the year and we look forward to 2021.

Schedule a demo

Talk to the team, ask us questions and see a demo of Skills Base for yourself.

Book my demo

Get started for free

Have a play around with Skills Base yourself and let us know what you think.

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