Many businesses spend a lot of time, energy and money to monitor and maintain their product inventory proactively. But what about your skills inventory? Do you know where your strengths are today? Five years from now? What about the members of your team?
A skills inventory could be your edge because let’s face it, the skill gap is already a problem! 87% of managers say their workforce is either severely underskilled already or will be in the next five years.
Staying ahead of change and risk mitigation are among the most essential soft skills for managers. So, we think a great manager (hey, you’re reading this article already, right?) will take note and address this blindspot quickly
How? With a skills inventory!
A skills inventory is a robust assessment framework that helps us understand individual skill sets and competencies and how they can be used best to serve a role in the organization. In simple words, a skills inventory is a skills assessment protocol.
This protocol helps an organization understand their employees as well as themselves better, specifically in the context of a job role, aspirational career goal, or the entire business. A skills inventory also highlights what you’ll need for a specific role, who are your best performers, and where the gaps are. In turn, it will leave you with the foundation to start making strategies to close those gaps.
PowerToFly aims to enable leaders to maximize their team’s talents and growth potential. However, to do so, we have to first understand each individual’s inherent, as well as acquired, skills better. The next step to understanding is utilization.
Let’s put people in shoes they can run in.
How to start a skills inventory
A business or manager looking to develop a skills inventory has to just follow five steps:
1. Which skills do we really need?
We answer this question by analyzing EVERYTHING. Macro-analysis should tell us our business’ strategy, vision, and goals. Micro-analysis should tell us what we need from each job profile.
The skills that we need from each employee have to be in sync with the macro requirements as well as the micro requirements. We can broadly classify them into either of the two general categories:
- Hard skills: This is a job-specific skill, job-relevant knowledge that helps one take on a specific responsibility in the organization. For instance, knowledge of CSS and Java for a website developer.
- Soft skills: These are skills that help one fit in the brand culture and work as a team. These are transferable skills that serve across jobs. For instance, time management or leadership.
You’re probably already doing this to some degree, but ensure that you set performance standards and at least some of your KPIs based on the skills required that you’ve just identified, which will let you gain insights into your workforce. These indicators then let you see employees’ strengths, weaknesses, and current skills.
2. Find your ideal assessment method
Depending on your resources, specific needs, and the nature and size of the business, you can pick from the following different methods to do your skills inventory, or do a combination of any and all of them.
- Self-assessment: Start by asking each of your team members about their self-identified strengths, weaknesses, goals, and ideas. While self-assessment can be biased, it can also help us recognize areas of interest and opportunities that an employee wants to receive for professional growth.
- Peer assessment: Anonymous peer reviews can help you see an employee from the lens of the people who work with them regularly. This will also help us understand how an employee fares in a team setting. Businesses should keep this process anonymous to avoid animosity or awkward situations.
- Manager assessment: The team lead’s review adds more clarity to the picture by providing a more zoomed-out and bird's-eye view of the employee, one that also factors in how they are performing in the larger scheme of the business. Are they aligned with their responsibilities as well as their team’s? How about the business’ long-term goals? That’s what an objective look at the employee from their supervisor can help us see.
- Past work record + performance appraisal: Nothing talks like work. Look at their track record. Assessing their work history over time can point out areas that need (or still need, we’re all guilty of this!) improvement. We recommend that performance appraisals should happen more frequently than annually for this exact purpose, as they can provide us with a comprehensive summary of an employee’s skill set, growth potential, and gaps.
It is important to keep in mind that each of these steps can involve some bias. Source and method reliability needs to be consistently checked and each layer should serve as an accountability partner for the other layers.
A holistic skills audit would combine all the above methods and go the extra mile to give you a 360-degree look at the employee. (Psst: want to integrate a smart skills audit into your business seamlessly? PowerToFly’s skills audit kit offers strategies to review, remedy, and rethink talent and skill set optimization.)
3. How to conduct the assessment
If you’re on this step, congratulations! You have identified the skills you want and the assessment method you will be opting for. What’s next? The assessment!
But wait wait wait, hold on! A few things to get in order first:
- Write down what you want from this assessment clearly so that you don’t sway from the original goal and the desired outcome(s). Mapping the purpose and the metrics for the assessment and then letting your employees in on the agenda will help everyone stay focused.
- Decide on a timeline. A full-blown skills audit can easily take days, if not weeks. To ensure the skills inventory exercise doesn’t hamper productivity and efficiency, create a timeline for it, and then stick to it!
- Determine who will conduct the assessment. Your core team should include supervisors, relevant subject matter experts, and maybe a soft skills coach. Once you have decided on the panel, you’ll also need to lay out a clear blueprint on how to go about this assessment.
- Decide on the metrics, the mode of reporting, and frequency. How regularly do you want to conduct a skills inventory? What are the parameters on which each individual will be assessed? It also helps to keep a skills checklist handy to ensure you are not missing out on any important metrics.
Okay – now you’re ready to conduct the assessment!
4. After-assessment analysis
You have conducted the assessment, you’ve dotted all your i’s and crossed all your t’s and now you have a mountain of findings in front of you. What next? It may be tempting to pounce on all the data, but without structure you’re not getting the best information from it.
Here’s how we suggest going about the analysis:
Skills matrix: Chart each employee, their job responsibilities, and skills according to the assessment. It’s important to record every aspect of the process so that we have an entry and exit point for the data.
Once you have their present skills listed, you also want to categorize these into which are crucial for the job and possibly rank them in order of relevance. Having another column for skills that you’ve identified as useful for the job but didn’t show on the assessment is also helpful, because these are the gaps we’ll be filling.
You could use graphs, pie charts, illustrations, etc. to make your skills matrix as consumable as possible. The main purpose is to document everything we have derived. A skills inventory needs to be something you can come back to often and update, put it in a format that makes it easy to edit and share with the right stakeholders.
Identifying the right stakeholders is also crucial. The completed skills inventory ideally remains with the core disciplinary team so they can revisit and update it as per the predetermined benchmarks back in step one.
5. Remedy and course-correct
With insight and data, we can now begin to strengthen the team:
- Constructive feedback: We started this process to help our businesses and team members grow, so based on the results of the assessment, you can now help your employees see the areas that need improvement or identify upskilling opportunities. It’s important to also highlight their competencies and strengths so that we can continue to nurture those skills too! Criticism and compliments are both important for professional growth, and constructive criticism needs to come with actionable course-corrective measures. None of this info should be dumped all on them right at the get; we suggest breaking the feedback into smaller tasks and bullet benchmarks, trying to match each point with the employee’s own personal goals and vision or self. This helps us meet them where they are, and makes any changes much smoother!
- Resources for employee growth: Identified a skill that’s missing in your team or perhaps one that needs external help? Then, why not enable them to go for it? Provide your team with the learning and development opportunities that will further improve their skills as well as your own growth potential. Allocating budget and time for learning could help your employees pick up the right skills at the right pace much faster.
No lesson is truly learned until it’s put to the test a.k.a….prepare for iterations. The skills inventory you have developed needs to be a logbook of sorts that is referred to and updated often. Monitor the progress of your employees and set measurable, achievable benchmarks.
A skills audit is a process that takes time, but overall it leads to more harmony between the employee and the employer.
Looking for a headstart? PTF’s SkillMeter is designed for this exact thing. Start from a place of inclusivity and data-backed strategy, including personalized recommendations.
