skills-based organization Archives - Skills Base

Building a Skills-based Org: The foundations for Measurement

Nick — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 00:32:00 +0000

Over the last year there has been a lot of discussion around what it means to be skills based. But, a missing piece of the puzzle are the fundamental steps necessary to get there.

A core part of becoming skills-based is to create a skills assessment framework – but this is not one-size-fits-all. Finding the right approach is the first step to a skills based organization. There are three broad skills assessment approaches that organizations generally consider:

An Inference Approach

An inference approach to skills tracking is based on the idea that information about staff skill levels exists within the organization (or abroad) and it is just a matter of finding, collecting, and processing it. This approach is generally appealing to organizations at first glance because a high level of automation can be employed in order to alleviate some manual work. Once skills are inferred they can be refined and validated by individuals.

However, what information does a machine realistically have to work with within the typical organization? In the absence of a prior well-executed skills management exercise, where can the source of reliable skills intelligence be found? As a rule of thumb, if a hypothetically best possible team of people, given unlimited time, could not discover skill insights from existing data in the organization, it is also not possible for Artificial Intelligence to do so since AI is only faster than humans, and not smarter (yet).

The proficiency of unique individuals in specific skills is not something that can be taken from a Job Description, since those documents are necessarily designed to represent groups of people. Identifying proficiency from resumes is also unreliable as there is no common set of rules and standards used in deciding the level of proficiency.

Resumes are also static documents (within the course of a person’s employment), so the longer a person remains in a job, the more out of date their resume becomes. This is true for any data that is not regularly updated. As such, an inference approach can fall victim to out of date information.

Ultimately, despite the appeal of the “hands-off” nature of an inference approach, there can be several drawbacks. A lack of a reliable skill insight data source, data with varying levels of accuracy, data currency uncertainty, and the possibility of bias.

An Organic Approach

The organic approach gathers skill insights directly from individuals. This approach is commonly used by social platforms since it provides the most flexibility for end-users. People can declare proficiency in any skill, in a generally unconstrained manner that allows them the ability to express their proficiencies as they desire. There are generally little to no rules in an organic approach.

An organic approach is perhaps the best way to overcome the obstacles of a social media platform, for example, where there are millions of people generally operating independently. As such there is also less reason to compare the skills of people on a level playing field, and so the fact that skill proficiencies don’t use a common method or structure is not as important.

However, this flexibility comes at a cost when employed within an organization. The lack of controls and structure means that it is not possible to rely on this data for making important business decisions. The lack of rules and standards means that it is not possible to compare the skills of people fairly, on a level playing field.

A Skills Framework Measurement Approach

A measurement approach is where an organization takes a data-driven approach to skill insights by employing a considered method for the measurement of skills.

The organization designs the parameters of how skills are to be measured up front, and ensures this is applied universally so as to ensure accuracy and fairness, and to decrease the influence of biases. The rules and guidelines of the approach are communicated to all stakeholders to ensure clarity and gain buy-in.

A measurement approach requires more up-front work than the alternatives, however, the organization may enjoy the rewards of that work for years into the future.

The Benefits of the Skills Framework Approach

A measurement approach provides several benefits to key stakeholder groups.

For Individuals

Measuring skills in a systematic way empowers individuals to take charge of their own careers, including providing clarity on their interest areas, orienting their thinking around skills, and providing an opportunity for self-reflection. It provides a clear and transparent framework that can be understood by anyone, and better helps individuals overcome their biases.

For Managers

Managers are able to gain confidence that their staff will be treated fairly and on a level playing field, and also increases confidence in the rigor of the data. It provides managers with higher quality data to inform decision making, and provides for more meaningful conversations with staff in activities such as performance reviews.

For Administrators

For those actively managing the skills data, this approach allows administrators to implement a skill data model that provides consistency across the organization. It ensures all data is compatible and facilitates the creation of flexible reporting across multiple cross-sections of the organization.

For The Organization

A measurement approach establishes a common language across the organization, and aligns expectations across stakeholder groups. It provides an organization-wide standard that removes doubt from the process and gives stakeholders the confidence that they need to make key organizational decisions. It declares a single, transparent approach that assists with the cultural change associated with introducing a skills management program, thereby improving stakeholder buy-in.

Ultimately, your approach to tracking skills should fit with your needs. In most cases, taking a measurement based approach will help you create a data-driven organization that will be more productive and see better outcomes.

Want to start measuring skills the best way possible? Become a skills based organization with Skills Base. Get started by trying our free offer for smaller teams, then book a demo to see how it can be scaled up for the wider organization.

The post Building a Skills-based Org: The foundations for 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.

How a Top 4 global accounting firm is tackling the Cyber Security Skills Gap

Nick — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 05:00:39 +0000

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.

The post How a Top 4 global accounting firm is tackling the Cyber Security Skills Gap appeared first on Skills Base.

Why you need to adopt a skills based talent management strategy

Nick — Wed, 18 May 2022 02:48:48 +0000

Talent management is the full scope of HR processes to attract, onboard, develop, engage, and retain high-performing employees. This means that talent management is both aimed at a) improving business performance in the current state and b) enabling a targeted approach for future growth and overall evolution.

Since 2020, we have seen a more agile approach to these key processes with a specific focus on skill insights becoming the nucleus used by the above processes.

As technology continues to cause disruption equating to planned and unplanned need for change, we have seen an urgent requirement for organizations to get a better understanding of their greatest asset; their people. The new currency is skills and this has only accelerated through the pandemic, emerging technologies and the shift towards a remote workforce. Innovative technologies are causing change at a record pace and as a consequence, an ability to adapt and lead the way forward is wholly dependent on the skills of your people. Technology skills are also becoming essential for people across all disciplines of work, not just IT.

The Ancient Greeks had a saying “Know Thyself” and only upon asking this question can we open up an exciting world of opportunity to assess who we are and plan for who we want to evolve into. Understanding your people’s skills is no longer a nice-to-have on a CV or document. In today’s fast paced world, skill insights are critical because they are dynamic. Innovation is happening by the minute and this in turn is enabling people’s skills to evolve through on the job learning.

If there is no plan to assess, review and use these skills then chances are that your Talent Management strategy could be at a high risk of failure. The ability to capture and use your skill insights will enable the key pillars that exist within Talent Management to truly come to life.

Using a skills based approach to enriching Talent Management Practices such as Talent Acquisition, Talent Retention, Talent Allocation and ultimately Talent Development Programs means those organizations that understand their skills are in a highly advantageous position. They can plan for the current, future and transitional states they want to achieve whilst assessing progress and adjusting as the need rises. Any effective Talent Management Program must have an agile capability and skills insights will enable this to occur.

Let the truth be told – do you know your greatest skills gap? Have you done anything about it?

The ultimate test which can expose the key threat to success is this real life scenario where a group of Executives who lead a variety of Departments are asked one game changing question;

“What is the greatest skills gap within your Department that will impact your ability to succeed against your key success metrics?”

Answer 1: We do not know because, we do not measure skills,
Answer 2: We have a generic, high level view of competencies,
Answer 3: HR might know,
Answer 4: How are we supposed to know?

The answer to that question is an eye opening realization.

We cannot reduce risk if we cannot see the risk.

At this very moment, you realize that the one variable you can control is the one variable you have lost control over.

If we do not have skill insights underpinning our Talent Management strategies then we are in turn unable to assess the value of our skills and the associated skills currency we possess or aspire to develop. Success and failure at every level is dependent on having the ability to understand, measure, and act on skills.

Below are some tips with reference to how skills insights are aligned to Talent Management.

Talent Acquisition

Recruitment is costly, and time intensive, but can be good to fill gaps quickly. But what gaps? Outsourcing work can be cheap, but how do we know that we’re filling the right skill gaps, with elite talent?. Skills based insights for talent acquisition doesn’t just enrich your ability to better align external investment requirements, but gives you the ability to invest in the people that matter most.

By developing internal candidates also provide the indirect benefit of retaining the core domain knowledge that’s learnt on the job. Something that might take months, or years for new hires to get a grasp on.

A scenario using a skills based approach to talent acquisition might follow these sequential steps:

What are our skills gaps and which success factors are dependent on them?
How do we know that we are lacking a specific skills gap as opposed to a role that assumes these skills exist in a candidate?
What is the impact the specific skills gap is having on our people, department or organization?
Do we have anyone internally who has the required skill at the required level and is suitable for the role / project / team?
Do we have enough time to train anyone who is interested & near qualified internally?
Do we Outsource this workflow or role based on a specific skill requirement?
Do we recruit with a targeted skills approach?
How will we evaluate that we have successfully recruited the required skill?

Talent Development

Developing internal talent is an important aspect of building a positive work culture, and improving employee experiences. This is because career stagnation is never a good thing.

A skills based approach to talent development is focused on clearly understanding your peoples current skill gaps, and strengths and then acting on these insights in an active way. If a skills gap exists, what training opportunities exist in the business to close that gap? Who exists in the business with elite skills that could mentor or coach an individual?

In addition to acting on those insights a skills based approach also provides a powerful data source to determine what training is working, and what isn’t. If ten people are finishing a course, with no improvement in skill level and competency, is the training working? Very quickly L&D teams and department heads will get a better grasp on ROI and be able to better allocate training investment.

Here are a few questions a skills based talent development manager might ask:

Are we developing the skills of our people in alignment with our current skills needs?
Are we developing the skills of our people for future skills / roles?
Do we have skills based career plans?
Are people getting promoted internally?
Do we have Talent Development Programs that are aligned with the skills gaps we need to develop? (This would include current / future roles however it would be inclusive of the following programs – Leadership Programs, Secondment Programs, Training Courses, On Job Training, the creation of specialist teams).
Are Programs driven by a need to deliver ROI that is measurable?

Talent Allocation

Not only can you better understand a teams’ skill gaps, but individual skill strengths and interests. This has significant value in being able to complete work and tasks in the most effective way, but also provide the most value to customers.

Let’s say that you have a high value customer project coming up. You want to know who in your organization has the skill strengths to deliver. Rather than just look at people and their CVs, you are looking at the underlying skill competencies to build that project team.

Another situation could be that an individual has shown significant interest in applying new skills or knowledge. By not just utilizing skill level insight, but augmenting decisions with skill interest, you can empower your people, and give them work and tasks that enrich their experience.

An organization that has completely embraced a skills based approach and using skills as a currency, can bypass the antiquated vertical business model, and instead focuses on true internal mobility of people within an organization.

Talent Retention

Retaining talent is becoming one of the most important parts of any talent strategy. A skills based approach is truly about building trust between employee and manager or employee and employer. By focusing on granular skills data that is transparent and accessible gives everyone a shared ownership of the employee experience.

Performance reviews can become collaborative and a two-way conversation. Remuneration can be linked to actual skill development. Career pathways can be mapped and agreed upon. Training can be measured and managers can be held accountable.

Any talent management strategy needs to be thinking about how to understand, measure and act on skills. It is no longer a nice to have, but an essential component to any organization. This wave is happening around the world, across all industries, and functions of business. Now is the time to get serious.

Looking to adopt a skills based talent management strategy?

The post Why you need to adopt a skills based talent management strategy 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.

The skills-based movement | 12 Industry Articles from 2021

Nick — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 09:10:48 +0000

2021 has been a chaotic year with our work environment continuing to change at an accelerating rate.

Delivery is moving away from the concept of function-based work, towards a dynamic pool of skilled and talented people from across, or even outside an organization.

The clear understanding of skill gaps and strengths is providing new pathways for people to upskill or be mentored. This is supplanting a sole focus on hiring.

For people to stand out, be heard, grow and thrive, skills are becoming the single source of objective truth.

The skills-based movement is here, and it’s picking up pace… fast.

And the good news is that it’s never been easier to build your skills inventory, assess skill levels at scale, and visualize skill gaps to act on.

You just have to get started — and we’re here to help, simply book in a time to chat and see what it’s all about.

Better yet, you’re not alone. Over the last year we’ve seen Deloitte, Mckinsey & Company, Forbes, Boston Consulting Group, SHRM, Gartner, Lighthouse Research and Advisory, and Mercer all talking about the benefits of a skills-based approach. (And this content is just the tip of the iceberg).

So grab a drink, and have a read of these 12 Articles from 2021.