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Skills Assessment | How to Effectively Measure Skills and Competencies

Nick — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 21:09:15 +0000

Understanding and optimizing the skills and competencies of employees is not just an advantage; it’s essential for organizational success. Many organizations already recognize the importance of assessing and managing their employees’ skills, understanding that identifying gaps and leveraging strengths are crucial for strategic utilization. Despite this awareness, the choice of methodology for skills assessment frequently leads managers to lean towards either subjective or objective extremes. This often results in missing out on a third option that could provide the comprehensive data necessary for making informed decisions – the structured subjective approach.

The challenge lies not only in identifying what skills exist within the workforce, but in accurately assessing these skills to pinpoint gaps, leverage strengths, and foster growth. Effectively addressing this challenge requires blending subjective insights with objective data, ensuring a comprehensive and accurate depiction of employee capabilities.

What is a skills assessment?

A skills assessment is a systematic process used to identify and measure an individual’s abilities, competencies, and knowledge in a specific area or field. It involves evaluating an employee’s skills to identify strengths, reveal gaps, and understand their proficiency levels. This assessment can be conducted using various methods, ranging from subjective evaluations, like self-assessments and supervisor feedback, to objective measures, such as standardized tests. The goal is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the workforce’s capabilities to inform talent management strategies effectively.

What are the benefits to measuring skills?

The benefits of skill assessment are multifaceted, contributing significantly to organizational growth and individual development and helps to:

Enhance the accuracy of understanding around employee capabilities, enabling targeted development programs.
Reduce biases in evaluations, fostering a more inclusive and equitable workplace.
Improve the strategic utilization of workforce strengths, ensuring that employees are placed in roles where they can perform optimally.
Create a culture of collaboration where employees and managers can talk to the same data points and create employee development plans based on genuine skill gaps or areas of interests.

Additionally, identifying skill gaps allows for timely intervention, ensuring that the organization can adapt and respond to changing market demands efficiently.

Overcoming the Challenge of Skills Assessment

Organizations often grapple with the significant challenges presented by the extremes of skills assessment: the subjective and the objective. While each method holds value, they also bring inherent pitfalls that can undermine the effectiveness of talent management strategies if relied upon exclusively.

Subjective assessments offer flexibility but are prone to inaccuracies due to biases and a lack of structure, compromising the reliability of the evaluation. On the other hand, purely objective methods, like standardized testing, often overlook the nuances of skills application and personal development interests. This can lead to a misleading organizational strategy, as these assessments fail to capture the full breadth of an employee’s capabilities, especially those more nuanced or context-dependent qualities that are critical for holistic performance.

The Subjective Approach

Subjective assessments are inherently flexible, allowing for the consideration of personal qualities and behaviors that are difficult to quantify. This flexibility, akin to the unstructured input of skills on business-centric social platforms, offers an unrestricted and adaptable approach similar to resume preparation.

However, this lack of structure often results in accuracy and reliability issues. Subjective assessments are prone to biases—conscious or unconscious—with personal relationships, preconceptions, and the halo effect potentially skewing results. This can lead to favoritism without objective justification, particularly in environments where individuals are motivated to present their skills in a certain light, such as seeking a pay rise or promotion.

The unrestricted nature of subjective assessments, while easy to manage and maintain from an administrative perspective, comes at a significant cost to data accuracy. Without clear guidelines or validation, there’s no solid frame of reference for measuring skills, leading to a reliance on individuals’ self-reported proficiency. This approach can hinder efforts to compare and group employees based on their skills effectively. The free-form answers and lack of coordination in skill categorization create a non-level playing field, making it nearly impossible to structure these skills in a logical way, detect duplication, and confidently report on the competencies that matter for organizational success.

For instance, in a purely subjective environment, an employee’s ability to articulate their achievements or network within the organization could unduly influence their assessment. This might overshadow the quiet competence of others in critical but less visible areas, further highlighting the challenge of using subjective assessments for systematic development and strategic planning within organizations.

Despite its accommodating nature, the subjective approach’s limitations make it unsuitable for effective skills management in an organizational context.

The Objective Approach

At the other end of the spectrum, objective methods, such as standardized testing, offer a way to measure skills and knowledge without personal biases, mirroring the academic approach used in higher education institutions. This method ensures a level playing field by assessing each skill uniformly, allowing for consistent comparison and grouping of individuals within the organization. The strict guidelines and controls inherent in objective assessments can effectively remove bias in performance measurement.

However, these assessments often fail to capture the full breadth of an employee’s skills, particularly those more nuanced or context-dependent qualities like leadership, creativity, and teamwork. The reliance on objective data can lead to a narrow view of an individual’s capabilities, potentially overlooking valuable strengths.

Additionally, objective assessments can sometimes push employees to focus on test-taking strategies rather than genuine skill development. They may also engender a competitive rather than collaborative environment, potentially stifling innovation and teamwork.

A purely objective approach comes with its challenges. It requires the creation or acquisition of a vast array of exams, potentially numbering in the hundreds or thousands, to cover the full range of skills within an organization. This not only proves costly to administer and maintain but also places a heavy burden on ensuring the content remains up-to-date and relevant. The emphasis on exams to judge knowledge or ability can lead to scrutiny and disengagement among employees, particularly if they perceive the assessments as flawed or not reflective of their true capabilities. Such disengagement is counterproductive to the goal of fostering a positive organizational culture geared towards continuous improvement and skill development.

While addressing some deficiencies of the subjective approach, the purely objective method poses its own set of problems when applied within an organizational context. The substantial effort and cost involved, combined with the potential for creating a narrow and possibly misleading picture of workforce skills, can compromise the effectiveness of skills management initiatives. Ultimately, while seeking to establish fairness and remove bias, the objective approach must be carefully balanced with considerations of its impact on employee engagement and the overall credibility of the skills assessment process.

Bridging the Gap: Towards a Balanced Assessment Approach

The downsides of relying exclusively on either approach can be far-reaching. Teams might be formed with members chosen for their quantifiable skills alone, missing out on the dynamic synergy of diverse talents. Promotions could bypass individuals with exceptional potential that hasn’t been captured through objective measures, or conversely, elevate those whose apparent competencies might not translate into real-world effectiveness.

Ultimately, an imbalanced approach to skills assessment can lead to misaligned talent management, where the organization fails to fully leverage its human capital, potentially stalling growth and innovation.

By acknowledging these challenges, it becomes clear that neither subjective or objective assessments can stand alone as the sole method for evaluating employee skills and competencies.

The next sections will explore how combining the strengths of both approaches within a structured subjective framework can mitigate these pitfalls, offering a more balanced, accurate, and comprehensive method for assessing and developing talent within an organization.

The Structured Subjective Approach

The Structured Subjective Approach leverages a blend of traditional assessment methods to balance the pros and cons of each, enhancing the accuracy of skills assessments and significantly reducing biases. This method not only fosters a more inclusive and equitable workplace environment but also aligns with emerging trends in talent management.

As organizations increasingly recognize the value of deep, actionable insights into their workforce’s capabilities, the integration of skills intelligence into key organizational functions becomes essential for sustaining growth and competitiveness.

By adopting a Structured Subjective methodology, supported by tools like Skills Base, organizations are better equipped to navigate the complexities of modern workforce management.

The following seven components support this approach and enable it to operate effectively; we’ll outline their benefits and then explore each in more depth below.

1. Organization-Authored Assessment

Custom assessments aligned with organizational objectives.

Above all else, it’s important that your organization defines, authors, and controls your own skills assessments. This allows them to be purposefully designed to achieve your organization’s specific objectives and ensures the best possible chance of success.

It also helps establish consistency and fairness across your organization when skills assessments are centrally managed; facilitating the ability to effectively compare individuals and teams.

The organization-authored assessment component sets the foundation of this approach and influences the remaining six controls.

2. Curated, Structured List of Skills

A relevant and evolving list of skills tailored to organizational needs.

A small team of relevant people within your organization should curate a structured list of skills which specifically align with your needs. This ensures only necessary data is collected and the right level of abstraction is achieved from the outset.

This process should be ongoing to make sure the list evolves over time and always remains relevant to your organization.

Looking for a list of skills to get started? See what the Skills Base Library has to offer.

3. Skills Assigned by Job Function

Role-specific skill assessments for focused development.

Considering every area of specialization can mean the list of skills that’s created can grow exponentially. To overcome this, skills should be assigned to people by their job function, specifically relating to their day-to-day work responsibilities. This will also help reduce the size of assessments you need to give and make them easier for team members to complete in a shorter time frame.

Assigning skills by job function allows for consistency in tracked skills between similar roles in the organization. For example, a group of Business Analysts can be better compared with each other because they have assessed the same set of skills.

4. Single, Standardized Numeric Rating Scheme

Consistent, quantifiable measures of skill proficiency.

One of the benefits of using the Structured-Subjective approach to skills measurement is that the assessment results can be quantitatively analyzed. Using a single, standard numeric rating means you’ll end up with a consistent, cohesive data set. That data set can then be sliced and diced in any direction, across any group, role, location, or skill set.

This data-driven approach removes the complexity that comes with a traditional subjective approach.

5. Defined Rating Criteria

Clear benchmarks for each rating, enhancing assessment accuracy.

When it comes to skill assessment, a numeric rating scale on its own is not enough. Assessors need to have minimal doubt about the rating they should select, so it’s important to define and set out clear and comprehensive criteria. This gives meaning to each rating and greatly improves the accuracy and consistency of responses, reducing bias.

Rating criteria are generally defined as a set of bullet points, since some criteria may better fit a particular person and skill, and others may better fit a different person or skill. The key is to be comprehensive so you can cover as many scenarios as possible.

6. Self-Assessment

Employee-driven insights into personal skills, guided by structured criteria.

It’s certainly beneficial to have a deep and intimate knowledge of each individual’s skill levels in order to effectively assess an organization as a whole. In reality though, there’s no one more knowledgeable of a person’s skills than themselves. Guided by the previous controls, a skills self-assessment provides first-hand information about your employees’ skills and can be an accurate and valuable input into skill insights. It’s also a way of supercharging the time it takes to get worthwhile data.

Skills Management is no longer a mystical, secretive process run by management – it’s now tangible and visible to everyone in the team. People appreciate that their input has been sought; this greatly enhances the cultural change activity inherent with any new process in an organization.

7. Supervisor Assessment

While a tightly controlled self-assessment yields rapid and accurate data, no amount of controls can eliminate all inaccuracies. Introducing an additional supervisor assessment serves to verify and validate self-assessment responses, further increasing accuracy.

It’s recommended you conduct the supervisor assessment after the self-assessment, so your supervisors can factor the self-assessment ratings into their decision criteria. Any disparity between the self and supervisor assessments will highlight a potentially interesting point of discussion. Why did one assess a lower or higher rating than the other? Is there a perception misalignment, or are there real skill gaps to discuss? The disparity can often draw out needed discussion items.

Measuring Skills: The Three Phases of Skills Assessment

Adopting a skills-based talent management strategy is essential for sustained business growth; however, the process of measuring your employees’ skills in the first place isn’t always straightforward. We recently shared how to effectively assign skills to your employees, but there are several phases to this that we want to go over further.

Initial Measurement (The Storming Phase)

Establishing a baseline and identifying skill strengths, weaknesses, and gaps.

The first phase of measuring your employees’ skills is critical for establishing a baseline for your organization. It’s often the most revealing stage of the process, with reams of new data emerging. It’s also at this point when many organizations find areas of skill strength or weakness, skill gaps, pockets of desire, or lack thereof. This information is, in many cases, compelling enough to motivate organizational change.

Most organizations are new to skills-based management using a measurement approach, though, and it’s easy to miss things or get priorities wrong – initial measurement exercises aren’t typically optimized.

When your initial assessments are complete, you can begin analyzing skill gaps, strengths, and desires. Having the ability to report on this through a skills matrix can often be the most eye-opening part of the journey.

Subsequent Measurement (The Norming Phase)

Refinement and action based on initial data, expanding the skill list, and aligning organizational expectations.

The results of the initial phase tend to prove the value of skills management activity but also show the myriad of larger-scale opportunities available with a more sophisticated approach.

There’s typically a lot of information to go through at this point in the measurement process. You may have also identified obvious opportunities and begun to take basic but impactful actions at an individual level. There are further steps you can take, though, to make the most of the opportunities you’ve discovered.

During this subsequent measurement phase, look to refine, expand or consolidate your list of skills, better structure people and hierarchies, introduce additional measures, and better align expectations within the organization.

Use the experience and learnings gained in the initial measurement phase to discover deep insights into your workforce. This will help you embed suitable actions into everyday business processes and make meaningful business decisions beyond the individual level. Transform the way the organization works and create positive impacts at a workforce scale, like a collective uplift in skills, better allocation of resources, and optimized training programs.

Ongoing Measurement (The Performing Phase)

Embedding skill measurement into daily activities for continuous improvement and leveraging data for high-level performance.

Historically, the act of assessing skills or competencies was linked directly to performance reviews or half-yearly checkups. However, as your teams and organization become more confident in the process, you can begin to unlock more opportunities.

Eventually, it will be easy to embed skill measurement exercises into the flow of work rather than seeing them as individual activities. Changes and improvements can be collected, reviewed, and implemented in an ongoing improvement cycle.

This phase of the measurement process is where you can begin to rely on skill measurement data to function at a high level of performance on a daily basis. However, for this process to be sustainable and scalable, it’s important to use more sophisticated tools than an Excel spreadsheet. (As nicely formatted as yours may be).

Implementing a Structured Subjective approach to skills assessment transforms the way organizations understand and develop their workforce. By integrating improved accuracy, bias reduction, and enhanced skills management, this method provides a solid foundation for identifying the true competencies within an organization. Self-assessment and supervisor assessment play pivotal roles in this strategy, offering a dual perspective that captures a comprehensive view of employee competencies. This approach not only acknowledges the individual’s perception of their skills but also incorporates managerial insight to validate and adjust these perceptions, ensuring a balanced and objective evaluation.

Effective skills assessment is a catalyst for organizational growth, providing a roadmap for targeted training, career progression, and ultimately, strategic talent management. By accurately identifying skill gaps, organizations can tailor their training programs to meet the precise needs of their workforce, ensuring that development efforts are both efficient and impactful.

Empowering Growth: The Future of Skills Management

The journey towards effective skills and competency management within an organization is both complex and critical for sustained success. The Structured Subjective methodology not only overcomes the limitations of traditional assessment methods, blending the precision of objective data with the depth of subjective insights. This balanced approach not only enhances the accuracy of skills assessments but also significantly reduces biases, fostering a more inclusive and equitable workplace environment.

Embracing a Structured Subjective method, supported by tools like Skills Base, offers a way forward that promises not just to understand and measure employee skills but to develop them dynamically. We encourage all organizations to consider this approach, not just as a method for assessment, but as a cornerstone of their talent management strategy, paving the way for a future defined by growth, innovation, and success.

Ready to kickoff your skills transformation project?

Our skills experts are here to help you make it a reality — Book now for a no obligation meeting.

The post Skills Assessment | How to Effectively Measure Skills and Competencies appeared first on Skills Base.

The Skills-Based Organization: What is it, Benefits & Examples

Nick — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 07:47:38 +0000

Welcome to the journey of building your skills-based organization – a journey that will empower you to unleash the full potential of your workforce. No matter what stage of the process you’re at, we’ll guide you through the steps, decisions you have to make around skills management and the benefits across talent decisions, breaking down complex concepts into digestible pieces.

What is a Skills-Based Organization?

Skills-based organizations value individuals based on their unique set of skills, competencies, and potential, enabling them to deliver high-quality work and drive business success. By shifting the emphasis from job titles to skills, organizations foster a culture of flexibility, agility, and innovation.

For instance, a high-performing team member may be adept at certain skills that can be leveraged across different projects and roles within the organization. This approach creates a dynamic environment that values diversity and perspectives, thereby fostering creativity, problem-solving, and innovation.

What are the Benefits?

Skills-based organizations offer a multitude of benefits that empower both individuals and the organization as a whole. Deloitte is just one of many organization who have advocated this approach, and in their September 2022 report found some significant outcomes for employees and the business as a whole.

In simple terms, by focusing on skills, organizations are able to:

Drive Innovation: By tapping into employees’ diverse skill sets, skills-based organizations create an environment that fosters creativity, problem-solving, and innovation. The ability to leverage the right skills at the right time leads to breakthrough ideas and novel approaches to challenges.
Cultivate Continuous Learning: By prioritizing skills development, skills-based organizations create a culture of continuous learning. Employees are encouraged to enhance their capabilities through training programs, workshops, and mentoring, ensuring they stay at the forefront of their respective fields.
Enable Agility and Adaptability: Skills-based organizations excel in rapidly changing industries. As skills take precedence over fixed job roles, individuals can adapt to evolving market demands, take on new projects, and easily transition between roles, allowing the organization to quickly respond to emerging opportunities.
Enhance Employee Engagement and Retention: When employees feel valued for their skills and have opportunities to grow and apply their expertise, they become more engaged and committed to the organization. This leads to higher retention rates and a stronger sense of loyalty.

There are many more benefits to becoming skills-based; it comes down to how you can leverage data to empower your people, teams and organization.

How to Build a Skills-Based Organization

Now that we understand what skills-based organizations entail, let’s explore how you can cultivate this transformative culture within your own organization:

Planning for a Successful Transformation

When it comes to planning for a successful transformation towards building a skills-based organization, there are three key areas to consider: people, process, and technology. Each of these plays a crucial role in navigating the complexities of skills management and talent management decisions. Let’s break them down:

1. People: It’s important to get the right people involved early in the transformation process. Remember, this is not a monolithic problem that can be solved by one department alone. HR cannot lead this without buy-in from managers and employees, just as managers cannot fully leverage the benefits without HR’s involvement. By involving all key stakeholders from the start, you can ensure a more holistic and effective approach to skills management and talent development.
2. Process: One of the key things to keep in mind is that the process of building a skills-based organization should be iterative and evolve over time. It’s perfectly normal to not get everything right from the start, and that’s okay. The goal should be to start fast, fail faster, and most importantly, learn and adapt. By embracing a mindset of continuous improvement, you can refine your strategies and processes to better address the needs of your organization and its people.
3. Technology: Finding the right system to solve the skills intelligence problem is crucial. Skills management is the cornerstone of a successful skills-based organization. Investing in a robust skills management software can help you efficiently identify, track, and develop the skills within your workforce. This technology empowers you to make informed decisions regarding talent deployment, succession planning, and learning and development initiatives. With the right skills management system in place, you can optimize your talent pool and ensure that your organization is equipped with the right skills to thrive in an ever-evolving business landscape.

Identify the Data Schema and Skills to Manage

Let’s delve deeper into the process of identifying the data schema and skills to manage within building a skills-based organization:

1. Building Your Skills Taxonomy: Skills are the fundamental building blocks of a skills-based organization. However, to effectively utilize skills within your organization, you need to establish a structured framework. The first step in this journey is to build your skills taxonomy. Think of this taxonomy as a comprehensive catalog that categorizes and organizes the various skills present within your workforce. By creating a clear taxonomy, you provide a common language that helps individuals understand, communicate, and develop their skills effectively.
2. Mapping Skills and Building Relationships: Once you have defined your skills taxonomy, the next crucial step is to map those skills and establish meaningful relationships. This involves connecting skills to various elements within your organization, such as people, teams, roles, geographic locations, training programs, projects, and even career pathways. By mapping skills to these different facets, you gain a holistic view of how skills are distributed, utilized, and developing across your organization. This mapping process enables you to identify skill gaps, optimize talent deployment, and create pathways for career growth and development.
3. Continuing to Evolve and Iterate: Skills are not static—they evolve and change over time. Similarly, the skills your organization and teams require will also evolve in response to market dynamics, technological advancements, and strategic priorities. Therefore, it’s essential to embrace a culture of continuous evolution and iteration when it comes to managing skills. Regularly review and update your skills taxonomy, adapt skill mappings to align with changing needs, and provide opportunities for individuals to acquire new skills and capabilities. By staying agile and responsive to evolving skill demands, you ensure that your organization remains competitive, innovative, and well-equipped to navigate future challenges.

Create a Methodology for Skill Measurement and Evaluation

Now that we have our skills mapped out, the next exciting phase is adding context to those skills. It’s time to bring these skills to life in a way that’s meaningful for making informed decisions about your workforce. This process should be intuitive, easy to understand, and seamlessly integrated into your organization’s talent management strategies.

When it comes to assessing skills, there are two common approaches to consider. If you solely rely on a completely objective assessment method, you might find it costly, time-consuming, and potentially inadequate for understanding the true impact of skills on a larger scale. On the flip side, leaning too heavily on a subjective assessment method may leave you questioning the reliability of your data.

So, what’s the solution? We believe in finding the perfect balance—a sweet spot we like to call the structured-subjective approach to skills assessment. By combining elements of objectivity and subjectivity, you can create a methodology that captures the nuances and complexities of skills while maintaining a level of consistency and reliability in your evaluations.
By adopting this balanced approach, you can gather valuable insights into your workforce’s skills landscape, identify areas for growth and development, and make strategic decisions with confidence.

Leverage Skill Insights for Key Workforce Decisions

When you create a skills-based organization, you unlock a powerful tool for making key workforce decisions—the ability to leverage skill insights. By building a real-time, trustworthy, and accessible data source, you have a solid foundation to guide your decision-making process.

Once you have established your baseline of skills within your organization, you can tap into that data in real-time. This means that you can harness the power of skill insights to inform and shape a range of workforce decisions that involve people. Let’s explore some of the areas where skill insights can make a significant impact:

1. Strategic Workforce Planning: With skill insights at your fingertips, you can align your workforce strategy with business goals more effectively. By understanding the skills your organization possesses and identifying skill gaps, you can develop targeted plans to meet future talent requirements and ensure the right skills are in place to drive success.
2. Resource Allocation: Skill insights empower you to allocate resources efficiently. By matching the right people with the right skills to projects, tasks, or teams, you enhance productivity, maximize talent utilization, and improve overall project outcomes.
3. Employee Development: Skill insights provide a roadmap for personalized employee development. Identify skill development opportunities tailored to each individual’s current skills and career aspirations. This approach fosters a culture of continuous learning, increases employee engagement, and accelerates professional growth.
4. Learning and Development Planning and Budgeting: Skill insights enable you to allocate your learning and development budget wisely. Identify skill gaps and prioritize investments in training programs that address critical needs, improving the effectiveness and strategic impact of your learning initiatives.
5. Internal Mobility and Career Mobility: Skill insights facilitate internal mobility and career mobility programs. By understanding the skills your employees possess, you can identify potential career paths, promote internal growth, and create opportunities for employees to leverage their existing skills while acquiring new ones.

These are just a few examples of how skill insights can impact your workforce decisions

Armed with the knowledge of skills-based organizations, you’re now equipped to take your organization’s growth and development to new heights. By embracing a skills-based approach, you unlock a world of innovation, continuous learning, and adaptability.

Remember, at Skills Base, we’re your dedicated partner on this journey, providing expertise around transformation, the fit-for-purpose skills management platform, and proven methodology to support your vision — Book your free meeting with a skills expert today.

Ready to kickoff your skills transformation project?

Our skills experts are here to help you make it a reality — Book now for a no obligation meeting.

The post The Skills-Based Organization: What is it, Benefits & Examples appeared first on 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.

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.

Becoming Skills-based in 2023: 6 Articles You Need to Read

Nick — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 00:33:00 +0000

As we move into the new year, there’s never been a more important time to embark on the journey to becoming skills-based. Whether it’s beginning with specific teams or looking widely across your organization to support people decisions – the value for talent acquisition, development, allocation, planning, reward, and retention is undeniable.

In Josh Bersin’s review for 2022, there is a clear indicator that the HR tech market is evolving, with the skills intelligence marketplace expected to continue to grow throughout 2023. This is in part to skills intelligence software or skills management software being an addition to your tech stack that works in a symbiotic way with your other systems.

The sooner you can begin understanding your skills and measuring competency, the sooner you will be able to take advantage of these insights.

To make the journey easier, we’ve collected 6 articles from the last year that any leader needs to read.

The skills-based organization: A new operating model for work and the workforce

By Michael Griffiths and Robin Jones

This article discusses the importance of shifting from a traditional organizational structure surrounding roles to a more skills-based approach. It also provides practical tips on how organizations can implement this change.

Taking a skills-based approach to building the future workforce

By Bryan Hancock, Nikhil Patel, Chris Higgins, Jonathan Law, Sarah Olson and Katie Van Dusen

This article highlights the importance of developing a skills-based workforce in order to stay competitive in the ever-changing job market. It also provides a framework for organizations to follow in order to make the transition.

Beyond the job: a new way to connect talent to work

A webinar with Ravin Jesuthasan, Cynthia Cottrell, and Andrew Lafontaine

A webinar discussing the shift from traditional organizational methods to a skills-based approach and how this benefits both the employer and employee.

The skills-based organization: A new operating model for work and the workforce

By Dan Pontefract.

This article explores the trend of organizations moving away from traditional job roles and towards a skills-based approach. It also offers practical advice on how organizations can make this transition.

The Journey to a Skills-based Organisation and the Role of the Talent Marketplace?

A discussion between David Green & Ravin Jesuthasan.

This article provides a detailed overview of the benefits of becoming a skills-based organization and the steps organizations can take to make the transition.

A Skill-Based Organization of Work: Opportunities & Framework

By Volker Jacobs.

This article provides a framework for organizations to follow in order to create a skills-based work environment. It also discusses the benefits of this approach and provides practical tips for implementation.

Looking for assistance in becoming Skills Based?

The Skills Base experts have been helping organizations become skills-based for the better part of a decade. With global leading technology, financial services, life sciences, resources, manufacturing and many other teams already seeing the benefits of skills insights across their people decisions.

If you’re looking to start your journey, reach out to the team, and see how we can help.

The post Becoming Skills-based in 2023: 6 Articles You Need to Read appeared first on Skills Base.