Your gold is in a Skills Audit

A bold headline I know! However it's true, with the right implementation a Skills audit of your team, department or complete enterprise can undercover the gold of your business and have a revolutionary impact of your skills pipeline and attrition levels. In this edition, we will share how to conduct an internal skills audit, what skills data is key to capture and how to encourage maximum participation for the benefit of all. In our next newsletter, we will focus on how to leverage the smart insights that will build an unparalleled skills strategy giving you the competitive edge in talent retention.

Having worked in the skills industry for two decades, it continues to amaze me how much enterprises will spend on new hires and the costs they have to absorb as a result of attrition. The energy and investment that goes into external hiring strategies goes way beyond any internal mapping that could transform how many new hires are actually needed.

You see on a personal level, the majority of us want to feel that we are always progressing and one of the most powerful methods of this is through learning and education. Traditionally it was third level education and then into your career with perhaps some on the job training. Today as automation advances are number one commodity, are the hard skill sets we hold. That is our value, coupled with our soft skills these are the leading indicators to the type of career(s) we will all hold.

So as a leader what can you do to ensure that you are facilitating the growth in importance on up-skilling and education for your teams and that you are ensuring new skills are being recognised for internal opportunities.

1. How to launch a Skills Audit

Decide the parameters of the skills you want to measure. We would recommend piloting with a department for the first quarter, to measure skills, the impact of the survey, participation and skills insights. This will enable you to make any adjustments to improve performance before rolling out country wide or throughout the organisation. For the pilot, the Skills Audit can be run as an independent survey but ideally at the next stage integration to your HR or Talent Management Technology would increase efficiency and enabling employees to have their own Digital Skills Profile would empower their own skills managed journey.

2. What Skills data is key

Analyse the skills data available to understand the starting point. In most cases this will be based on the CV that the employee originally applied with. What we need to allow for is that many workers are actively up-skilling in their own time through learning, education and other activities. So you want to ensure the skills list is broad enough that all can be captured (our skills database is over 50,000!) and that is has hierarchy and clustering to guide the user. We recommend to capture separately existing hard skills and soft skills as well as those desire. Further integration can be put in place then with your LMS* so that recommended learning is fed straight into the Digital Skills Profile dashboard personalised to each user.

3. How to maximise participation

The shorter the survey the higher the take up, so we recommend no longer then 8 min. Expectation management is everything, there needs to be a clear message upfront and through out as to the positive impact for the individual. Whether it is receiving access to future learning that will advance their skills or having the option to opt in to an inclusive skills matching discovery platform for new opportunities, motivation for each person will be key.

Ultimately the leaders will be the champion of a successful Skills Audit. In this remote and hybrid world, sending an email survey just wont cut it. It must become part of the dialogue of meetings, inspiring words shared and baked into the culture of learning and development.

In summary, as an enterprise no matter what industry you are in, your greatest assets are the skills of your people. By measuring what they are, investing in them and mapping progression you will have an unlimited skills supply for the future and a happier more committed workforce.

Abodoo is the leading skills mapping and inclusive skills matching platform to reduce attrition and future proof skills. Our skills audit provides the powerful insights so that your talent planning and learning programmes can accurately meet the future needs of the organisation.

If you would like to learning more about us go to www.abodoo.com or contact us on [email protected]