skills based Archives - Skills Base

Skills Gap Analysis: The Definitive Guide for Modern Enterprises

Nick — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:57:04 +0000

The traditional approach to human resources is failing. For decades, organizations have managed their most valuable asset—their people—using tools designed for the industrial era. We treat employees as static entries in a spreadsheet, defined by rigid job titles, historical credentials, and annual reviews that are obsolete before the ink dries.

In a global economy where the half-life of a professional skill has dropped to a mere five years, this static model is not just inefficient; it is dangerous. If you are relying on job titles to understand your workforce, you are managing a fiction. You are flying blind into a market that demands agility.

If you are a CxO, an HR leader, or a People Manager, you are likely currently in “problem-solving mode.” You are facing a Skills Gap—the widening chasm between what your organization needs to achieve its strategic goals and the actual, verified capabilities of your workforce today.

This guide is your antidote to the “way we’ve always done it.” It is a comprehensive blueprint for conducting a Skills Gap Analysis that actually drives ROI. We move beyond the buzzwords to build a digital model of your workforce capabilities.

What is a Skills Gap Analysis? (The Real Definition)

At its core, a Skills Gap Analysis is the process of comparing your organization’s current workforce capabilities against the skills required to meet your business objectives.

However, at Skills Base, we define it with more precision: It is the identification of the strategic delta between verified proficiency and operational demand.

It is not a subjective “feeling” that a team is struggling. It is not a “Training Needs Analysis” (which focuses only on L&D). It is a data-driven diagnostic that uncovers exactly where your talent architecture is failing to support your business reality. It answers the critical questions that keep executives awake at night:

Do we have the talent to launch this product in Q3?
Why is our engineering velocity slowing down despite hiring more engineers?
Are we overspending on contractors because we don’t know who has these skills internally?

A true analysis provides Skills Intelligence. It moves beyond high-level charts to understand the “so what” behind the numbers. It is the foundation of Skills Gap Analysis itself—a tool that empowers everyone from the CEO to the front-line employee to make smarter talent decisions.

The Cost of the Invisible Gap

The “status quo” of talent management is expensive. Most organizations only realize they have a skills gap when it is too late—when a project fails, a key employee resigns, or a competitor out-maneuvers them.

The Recruitment Burden: Recent SHRM data indicates the average cost per hire is over $4,700, but the “true” cost—including lost productivity, onboarding, and ramp time—is often three to four times the role’s salary. When you hire externally for a gap you could have filled internally, you are leaking capital.
The L&D Black Box: Without a clear analysis, Learning and Development (L&D) spend is often wasted on “blanket” training. Research from Gartner shows that 70% of employees report they lack the skills needed for their jobs, despite billions spent on generic LMS platforms.
The Obsolescence Risk: The World Economic Forum reports that 50% of all employees need reskilling to match the pace of technology. If you are not mapping these gaps today, you are planning for a future with an obsolete workforce.

How to Conduct a Skills Gap Analysis (The 6-Step Methodology)

We break the old habit of manual data collection and “gut feel” estimations. We replace it with a structured, contextual, and connected six-step process.

Step 1: Build the Target Model (The Taxonomy)

You cannot measure what you haven’t defined. Most companies fail at the first hurdle because they rely on generic job descriptions downloaded from the internet. To succeed, you must build a bespoke skills taxonomy.

This is the dictionary of your organization’s value. It reflects your unique language, your competitive edge, and your specific operational needs.

Be Specific: Do not list “Leadership.” That is too vague to measure. List “Agile Project Management,” “Cloud Architecture (AWS),” or “Conflict Resolution in Distributed Teams.”
Define Proficiency: What does “expert” look like in your context? A Level 4 Python Developer at a bank looks different from a Level 4 Python Developer at a startup. Use a standardized scale (e.g., 1–5) to ensure that when a manager in Sydney says a developer is “proficient,” it means the same thing to a director in London.
Avoid “Soft Skill” Fluff: Treat human skills with the same rigor as technical skills. “Communication” is vague; “Technical Documentation for API Integration” is a measurable skill.

Step 2: Map to Business Architecture (The Alignment)

This a key architectural step. You must create clear connections between talent and operations. Mapping is the process of aligning your data model to the way your business actually functions.

A list of skills is just data. A map of skills is intelligence.

Link Skills to Roles: Define which skills are “core” (mandatory) versus “aspirational” (nice to have) for specific roles. Gartner reports that the number of skills required for a single job is increasing by 10% year-over-year.
Link Skills to Teams and Locations: A “Customer Success Manager” in the US might need “Spanish Language Proficiency,” while the same role in the UK needs “GDPR Compliance.” Your map must reflect this nuance.
Link Skills to Workflows: Map capability data directly to your operational goals. If your strategic goal is “Migrate to the Cloud,” you must map the specific skills (Azure, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes) required to execute that goal.

The Result: When a gap appears, you know exactly which business unit is at risk. You move from saying “We lack Java skills” to “Our Auckland delivery team lacks the specific Java skills required for the Q3 banking project.”

Step 3: Measure Current Capability (The Assessment)

Now that you have the target, you must inventory the reality. You need to move from static resumes to a dynamic view of verified capability using Skills Assessment software.

Self-Assessment: Start with the employee. Ask them to rate their proficiency against the taxonomy you built. This engages them in the process.
The Verification Layer: Self-assessment is useful, but verified data is the gold standard. Use manager reviews or subject matter expert (SME) verification to confirm true strengths. This eliminates the “Dunning-Kruger” effect where novices overestimate their ability.
Capture Interest: A gap is not just about what people can’t do; it is about what they want to do. Mapping employee interest levels allows you to close gaps through motivation rather than mandate. If you have an engineer who is a novice in AI but has a high interest in learning it, that is your solution, not a problem.

Step 4: Analyze the Delta (The Matrix)

Once you have your “target” (Step 1 & 2) and your “actuals” (Step 3), you must visualize the delta. This is best achieved through a Skills Matrix.

Visualize Side-by-Side: A matrix allows you to instantly spot team strengths and critical gaps. You can see, for instance, that while your Engineering team is 90% proficient in Python, they are only 10% proficient in the Cybersecurity protocols required for your next release.
Leverage AI Intelligence: This is where Skills Lens changes the game. Manual analysis of thousands of data points is impossible. Our AI-powered “agents” analyze your workforce trajectory. Instead of staring at a 500-row spreadsheet, Skills Lens tells you: “You are at risk of missing your deadline because only two people have the ‘Cloud Security’ verification required for this project.”

Step 5: Execute the Action Plan (The Fix)

An analysis without action is just noise. Once you identify a gap, you have three strategic levers to pull. Do not pull them randomly; use the data to decide.

Upskill and Reskill (Build): Target your L&D budget exactly where the gaps are. Stop sending everyone to the same leadership seminar. Assign specific training to the specific individuals who need it to close a specific gap. Gartner data shows that 33% of the skills present in an average 2019 job posting are already obsolete—continuous building is the only way to keep up.
Internal Mobility (Borrow): Use your data to find “hidden experts.” Perhaps a marketing manager has a verified skill in data analysis that isn’t being used. Deploy them to a data project. This is faster and cheaper than hiring. Deloitte found that skills-based organizations are 107% more likely to place talent effectively.
Strategic Recruitment (Buy): When you must go external, do so with surgical precision. Create a job description based on the exact gap you need to fill, not a generic template. This reduces time-to-hire and ensures the new hire actually solves the problem.

Step 6: Embed, Learn, and Iterate (The Culture)

A skills gap analysis is not a “one and done” project; it is a continuous loop. To drive lasting ROI, you must embed this process into your organizational culture.

Continuous Updates: We challenge the “annual review” model. Skills change too fast for annual cycles. Encourage employees to update their profiles as they complete projects or certifications. This keeps your digital workforce model real-time.
The Feedback Loop: Use your findings to refine Step 1 and 2. If you find your “expert” criteria for a specific skill didn’t lead to project success, update your taxonomy.
Cultural Integration: Make skills visibility a benefit, not a surveillance tool. When employees see that their skill data leads to internal promotions, project opportunities, and personalized growth, they become active participants.
Measure Success: Track the ROI. Are you hiring less externally? Is project velocity increasing? Is employee retention improving? Use these insights to prove value upward to the board.

Winning Over the Committee

A skills gap analysis affects everyone. To succeed, you must demonstrate value to three distinct groups in your buying committee.

For the CxO: Driving ROI and Reducing Risk

Executives do not care about “skills” in a vacuum; they care about capability. They need to know if the workforce can execute the three-year strategic plan.

The Value Prop: We show you that “talent risk” is “business risk.” According to PwC, 74% of CEOs are concerned about the availability of key skills. By identifying gaps early, we prevent costly project overruns and ensure the organization remains agile. We provide the “So What?” behind the data, turning HR metrics into executive intelligence.

For HR Leaders: Efficiency and Strategy

HR is tired of being the “spreadsheet police.” They spend too much time chasing data and not enough time on strategy.

The Value Prop: We automate the collection and verification of data. We provide a platform that integrates into existing workflows, meaning HR becomes a strategic partner that provides verified data the board can actually trust. You stop guessing and start knowing.

For the CxO: Driving ROI and Reducing Risk

If the end-user doesn’t see value, the data will be poor.

The Value Prop: People leaders gain a tool to coach their direct reports objectively. Employees gain a “career roadmap.” They can see exactly which skills they need to develop to reach the next level, turning the gap analysis from a “test” into an “opportunity.” Gallup research shows that individuals who use their strengths every day are six times more likely to be engaged at work.

Conclusion: Move Beyond the Spreadsheet

Spreadsheets are where skills data goes to die. They are static, prone to error, and disconnected from your daily workflows. They cannot model the complexity of a modern workforce.

Skills Base is the platform for Total Talent Visibility.

We help you move beyond the surface level. With our tools, you aren’t just looking at a point-in-time snapshot. You are building a dynamic, real-time model of your organization’s competitive edge. You are giving yourself the visibility to manage today and the insight to plan for tomorrow.

Stop guessing. Stop hoping. Start measuring. Deploy an agentic analyst team with Skills Lens and start making smarter talent decisions powered by verified skills.

The post Skills Gap Analysis: The Definitive Guide for Modern Enterprises appeared first on Skills Base.

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.

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.

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.