Visual Workforce Blog

Today we’re kicking off a new series here on the Visual Workforce blog. It’s called Burning Questions and it’s focused on answering the questions we hear most commonly when we speak with HR professionals and organizational leaders who are embarking on skills management initiatives.

This week we’re tackling a question that’s fundamental to any skills management program: “How do we know what skills we should be tracking?” It’s a tricky one and the answer will vary from company to company (and even from team to team), but we’ve got some tips to get you started.

With Visual Workforce, skills management initiatives don’t need to be year-long or even six-month projects. Organizations can leverage out-of-the-box skills libraries, a powerful survey engine, and pre-built visualizations so they can collect and catalogue data about their employees’ skills and proficiencies and start generating valuable insights about their workforce in days, not weeks or months.

For decades, HR leaders have been trying to eliminate biases and become more objective when it comes to making human capital decisions. We believe that a rigorous approach to skills management can go a long way towards helping organizations accomplish this goal.

The opportunity to embrace a more objective, data-driven approach to human capital decision-making is there – organizations just need to put the systems in place to weave the collection, analysis, and use of critical skills data into their existing processes and company culture. Below are four steps you can take to revolutionize the way you approach human capital decision-making.

Let’s face it - it can be a struggle to get people to do anything on a regular basis, aside from checking Instagram. Yet, a skills inventory that is out of date can be a major blow to the efficacy of a skills management initiative and the overall impact that skills data can have on human capital decisions. So, how can your organization incentivize people to proactively keep their skills up to date?

We have identified four easy steps that any organizations can take to keep skills management top of mind and get long-term buy-in from across the organization.

When it comes to skills management, the single most important thing you can do is get alignment on the proficiency definitions that will be used to measure skills across the organization. You want to make sure that a rating of a 4 means the same thing to a sales manager as it does to someone in HR or technology.

In effect, what you want to do is create a rating system that can be applied accurately and consistently across the organization by different managers who are rating employees on widely different skills.

HR professionals know that soft skills can be just as important as hard or technical skills when it comes to finding, developing, and retaining top talent. In fact, soft skills can often play a huge role in whether a new hire, promotion, or assignment works out in the long run. According to a recent study published by LinkedIn, “92% of respondents say soft skills are more important than technical skill” and “89%...[of] bad hires typically lack soft skills.”

With numbers like that, it is no wonder that insight into employees’ soft skills is high on the priority lists of many organizations. The problem is, most don’t know where to start.

Change can be intimidating and for many organizations the activities around a skills survey can be seen as a prelude to a big change like layoffs, a reorg, or even a merger or acquisition. This is a natural, albeit frustrating, response to this type of initiative – but it can be avoided.

That's why we've identified 4 steps you can take to put your employees’ minds at ease when it comes to skills management.