Why & How To Keep Employee Skills Database Updated

In this series on ‘skills’, I have described how the employee skills are at the core of nearly all your operations. Whether you wish to allocate employees to various projects, find? replacements for people on leave, estimate projects, or meet an urgent customer requirement, the questions related to skill sets must be answered first. You will need answers to questions like whether right combinations of skills are present , whether the competency levels are right, and whether capabilities to perform specific tasks are present? in the employees that you are going to shortlist.??

You need all the above answers unambiguously and quickly. Such capabilities must be acquired carefully, when you have to find the right people among hundreds or even thousands of employees from several locations and business units. You need an enterprise software system that gives you tools to configure skills taxonomy, define competency levels, and provide means to match and search.

I now come to the next step : populating your skills database and keeping it updated.

Methods of capturing and updating skills

1. Manual updating

• In this method, each employee adds or updates his or her skills in some kind of skills management system. The organization makes a policy that each employee must update the skills, say, every 6 months.?

• An employee adds a skill as per the skills taxonomy, duration of experience, and competency level. The employee’s supervisor approves, modifies or refers it to an expert depending on the competency level or specialization of the skill.? For example, if an employee adds Java programming at ‘proficient’ level, the supervisor may refer to an expert within or outside the organization.

• Such a manual system seems to be simple to implement. But it is a standalone system. It may not be good enough to answer the questions mentioned above.

• There is another challenge, getting every employee to update and every supervisor to decide. I shall deal with this challenge later in this article.

2. Automatic updating from finished projects and tasks

• You already have good information on their finished projects - who worked on them, which tasks did they perform, and how well they did.? A software system that captures all the details, adds it in the respective employees skills profile and prompts employees and their supervisors to confirm or edit.?

• For example, if an employee has finished 20 project tasks in 6 months, the above system will pick up the skills needed in those tasks, and present an update for confirmation.

• Obviously, your standalone project management and HR management systems won’t do the job unless you bridge the information gaps through spreadsheets. You know that this approach quickly becomes unwieldy and causes errors and delays in making decisions.

• This is a perfect use case for AI. Since AI agents can analyze your corporate data in the way you need, they can easily handle other related tasks like finding people with adjacent skills in case you don’t have enough people with specific skills. An enterprise system that captures and processes all the information and processes it to provide you with answers.

3. Picking up skills from platforms like Linkedin

• Linkedin and or similar platforms that hold databases of skills of a large number of professionals. They also have some kind of ‘endorsement’ system to provide a degree of validation of skills claimed by individuals.

• A software system can automate the job of fetching the endorsed skills of your employees periodically. It maps the skill imported from the platform to skills as per your taxonomy and presents them to respective individuals and their supervisors for review.?

• Building such a system is complex. An AI agent can plug into your enterprise data and carry out mapping , searching, and other related tasks.

4. Scanning employees’ resumes

• You have employees’ resumes in your corporate database. You can set up an automated system to scan their skills, map them to your skills taxonomy, and prompt for review as in the case of the above systems. Like the above methods, an AI agent specifically trained for the job can do this quickly.

• For example, an employee uploads a revised resume with additional skills like Java, SQL, and project management, this system can capture it.?

Challenges in updating skills database

The first system above is simple but, clearly it is not suitable for most organizations. Skills captured from Linkedin or employees resumes may not reflect the current status if employees don’t update their profiles or resumes.? So getting them to update their skills is one challenge.

You need an enterprise-wide integration of data to avoid errors and delays in getting right information and answer questions like the ones mentioned in the beginning of this article.

The solution: empowering employees to manage their careers

To encourage employees to update their skills, you need to incentivize them. The incentives can be in the form of some kind of gamification that has skills upgrade leaderboards, a reward points system and a policy for tangible rewards.?

Another motivator, even more powerful, is letting employees see their career progress, what more they have to do, and a support system in the form of mentorship to help them achieve their goals. Empowering employees to manage their careers is more effective in retaining and attracting talent than picnics, parties, and off-site events.

Only an enterprise software, like AI-embedded PSA, that straddles your proposal building, project management, HR system, and resource management system etc can do all the above.?

Conclusion

You need a skills taxonomy and an effective system of updating your skills database for quick and reliable decisions for resource management. Such a system will help you maintain your talent pool in top shape and of adequate size for tomorrow.

Kytes is professional automation software (PSA), that provides you well tested and configurable AI-embedded workflows? to update your skills database. Kytes conforms to data privacy and security standards. Kytes’ capabilities and benefits go well beyond all the above.

In the forthcoming editions of PSA Insights, I shall discuss how to leverage your skills database to meet day-to-day and strategic challenges.

Contact us for more information and a demo at [email protected]