Could a Skills Audit do more for your Bottom Line than a Financial Audit?
Everyone is talking about the shift to skills-based organizations. But like many buzzwords, it’s being thrown around without much substantive clarity on what it actually means, and how companies can use a skills lens to their advantage.
Definitions will vary, but generally speaking, becoming a skills-based organization is the process of identifying, evaluating, planning, and projecting the existing, missing, and future skills needs of your organization and using that information to plan your broader talent strategy, including hiring.
Notice that the definition isn’t a silver bullet solution to all hiring or HR issues.? It is one tool among many for thinking critically about your current talent, what’s missing, and how to fill those gaps.
Done well, it’s not just about hiring.? It’s about having greater clarity within your own organization about the skills your team already has, what’s missing, and what you might need in the future.? Once you have a skills inventory, it’s easier to identify skill gaps, and then decide if those gaps can be plugged by upskilling existing employees, adding headcount, or outsourcing.
In this article, we will focus on the first step in becoming a skills-based organization, skills inventories.
What can you do with a skills inventory?
At it’s core, a skills inventory is the systematic collection of information about the skills individuals in your organization have that can then be analyzed and used for a variety of purposes.? The most common use case is for identifying skills gaps at an organization, departmental, or team level.? Let’s say you are looking at a 5-year plan to move into clinical trials, and your current team is primarily R&D.? You know you are going to need people with FDA and IND experience, but looking at your current skills inventory, you can see that no one on the team currently has those skills.? Even though it’s not an immediate need, recognizing that it’s a need that is coming gives you more options.? You can think strategically about what makes the most sense, sending a current team member to train up, hiring someone new, or outsourcing.? If you wait until the trials are approved, you have removed many of the options that require longer time horizons and are left with needing to scramble to find the right person yesterday.
A growing use case is as an internal “upwork”.? Imagine being assigned a project and realizing that you will need someone with database design skills to help you think through the data storage piece of your project. You can pull up your organization's skills inventory, and get a list of everyone in the company with that skill, and find someone to add to your team. In an ideal world, projects are no longer the purview of a single department, instead, teams form and dissolve on a per-project basis, pulling in people as needed from all over the company to more efficiently use their skills. In addition these temporary teams give employees more access to parts of the business they normally wouldn’t be exposed to, helping them see the bigger picture, get to know colleagues, and feel refreshed by new challenges outside their normal scope, which can lead to higher employee retention.
Skills Inventories can also help employees on an individual level if they have access to their own skills profiles, they can easily identify skills they may be missing especially if paired with information about the career ladders available to them within the company.
Another less common use case is to identify a glut of skills in a particular area.? You may realize that while the company's primary focus is tissue generation, you also have a lot of protein experts.? Rather than underutilize that expertise, suppose you challenge these experts to use 10% of their time on non-essential research that may lead to improvements in bioprocess optimization, or new nanostructures for drug delivery, that could eventually be commercialized.
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How to conduct an internal skills audit
The good news is that you already have the information you need for a skills inventory.? The bad news is that it is currently captured on separate documents and in the minds of employees, making it hard to access, and nearly impossible to analyze at scale.
Here are some common places you might currently be storing skills information:
Now that you know where this information might be, you can begin developing a plan for collecting, storing, and organizing all of the skills info into one place.? There are three main solutions; using an out of the box pre-built database like iMocha and trying to adapt it to your needs, working with a provider like Digital Science’s Symplectic to create a tailor-made solution like this one built for the Ohio Innovation Exchange, or building your own internally.
Designing the Skills Inventory
Whether you are designing your skills inventory yourself, or you are working with a company to help you design it, you will want to answer some questions for yourself before getting started. Below is a list of questions to help you get started.
As you begin to think about your skills inventory, you will find there are more and more questions to be answered, which is why it can be helpful to partner with an organization like Scismic, which has extensive experience with the skills in your particular industry.
For more information about the >8,000 STEM skills Scismic has identified and how you can use them to become a more skills-based organization, contact [email protected]