Skills Gap Analysis Archives - Skills Base

Skills Gap Analysis Checklist and Timeline

Nick — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 23:47:11 +0000

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.

The post Skills Gap Analysis Checklist and Timeline appeared first on Skills Base.

The Importance of Career Skills Gap Analysis & How it Affects Internal Mobility

Nick — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 01:53:03 +0000

As some jobs disappear, some change, business needs evolve, and good talent becomes more difficult to find, obtain, and retain, focusing on skill gaps and internal mobility is only becoming more crucial to the success of organizations around the world.

Continual learning and upskilling is essential not only for the individual, but for the workforce at large. This is where analyzing skills gaps is essential. While it can seem like a large undertaking, once you have a process set up (along with some tools to help automate some of the process), finding gaps in career skills and helping staff upskill or fill gaps in teams becomes easy.

What is a skills gap analysis?

A skills gap analysis is a tool that helps organizations identify opportunities for training and internal mobility among staff and teams. It looks at where an individual, team, or organization is currently versus where you want or need to be in the future.

From a high level, this means looking at the skills missing throughout the organization currently, versus skills that will drive future success. From an individual level, it’s about identifying gaps in skills or skills that are untapped and how these align with your organization’s strategic objectives and priorities.

How to identify skills gaps

Conducting a data-driven skills gaps analysis requires a specific process to ensure it is streamlined, consistent, and easily repeatable.

Review strategic goals and objectives: Start from the top and think about what your organization is moving towards. Understanding this can help identify the skills needed to get there.
Identify current skills of your workforce: Map the skills of your teams and individuals to see what the makeup of your workforce is currently.
Assess and identify future skills: Now is the time to find those gaps. Test and rate skill levels and analyze this to find where individuals and teams can develop skills or learn new skills and close gaps.
Create a way to close the gaps: Once you know the skills that are missing or need improving, the next step is to design a way to close them through training, development, internal mobility, or new talent.
Repeat!: Businesses change and evolve all the time. It’s important to look for skills gaps regularly to see where staff can grow, learn, and evolve with changing industries and business needs.

We have a great checklist and timeline that goes into this process in further detail here.

The benefits of skills gaps analysis

There are lots of reasons why analyzing skills gaps is important. Not only does it help organizations understand how to build better workforces, but it also helps retain staff, reduce hiring and training costs, and increase overall profits. By identifying skills gaps and opportunities to upskill, you can create higher performing teams who are happier and more productive. This also means better internal mobility and more strategic recruitment in the future.

The best way to understand and fill skills gaps is by becoming a skills based organization. While it can seem overwhelming, if set up right, it can become a streamlined process with huge rewards. Enlisting the help of skills management software can help streamline this process further, so if you want to start acting on your skill gaps, book in a time to talk to the Skills Base team today!

Interested in learning more about skill gap analysis?

The post The Importance of Career Skills Gap Analysis & How it Affects Internal Mobility appeared first on Skills Base.

Identify Skill Gaps Faster with the new Competency Analysis Chart

Nick — Mon, 05 Apr 2021 03:19:27 +0000

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The post Identify Skill Gaps Faster with the new Competency Analysis Chart appeared first on Skills Base.