Knowing the Skill Sets of Your Organization’s Workforce is Invaluable

Knowing the skill sets of your workforce is invaluable. But sometimes, this can be a difficult feat to accomplish. Asking your workforce to manually enter their skills into your organization's TMS or HCM portal may not be the best approach.

So what’s the best way to approach this?

Begin by thinking about the skill sets that you know each employee possesses. Depending on the size of your organization, this may be a relatively large task, and you may need to lean heavily on your HR team and recruiting team.

You can start by listing every employee with their role, forming a list of each of their skills that immediately occur to you. This is important, as skills refer simply to something an employee can do. A skill set, on the other hand, refers to the combination of abilities that connect to a specific role/position within your organization.

Meet with department managers to guarantee you’re putting together an accurate representation of the skill sets each employee has. You may find that department managers can more easily identify skill sets or skillset gaps than you can.

You can allow employees to let you know what they think their skill sets are via your TMS or HCM portal and explaining this is a way to help them achieve success within your organization; offer an incentive by pushing the idea of leaving a legacy or upward movement.

This will help you put together an accurate summary of the kinds of potential each employee possesses, and better yet, you can use the opportunity to ask them if they think they have skill sets they need to develop further or any areas of the business they’re interested in learning more about.

The next step is to complete a skills assessment. Most organizations look for outside vendors to set up an external framework and utilizing APIs that will run seamlessly and run at certain intervals, letting you know what skills are necessary to fill an open position.

Skills assessments are designed to assess whether individuals have the skills necessary to perform various and essential aspects of a job. The assessment can also assist your recruitment team while looking for potential candidates.

This can offer valuable insight into the hiring process by eliminating job candidates that may be under-qualified for a position, even if their resume says otherwise. However, aside from verifying the claims of applicants, it can also identify employees that may be better suited for another role or a promotion.

Skills Assessments can be utilized to better understand and develop employees in a way that benefits their long-term values and goals, identify areas in which the company is successful or struggling, therefore providing information on areas or departments that may require more training, and provide a comparison between the organization's talent and abilities against the geographical or industry standards.

In essence, a skills assessment may cost upfront, but in the end, it will help you to hire qualified staff, give opportunities to your current workforce, and help to lower your turnover rate.