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When we speak to L&D teams, they tell us skills mapping takes nine to 12 months.
And if you’ve stopped to look around lately, you’ll know that skills are moving WAY too fast to spend this long doing it manually.
If we’re going to close skills gaps and help our organisations win, we’ve got to speed it up!
This blog explains why we get stuck on the manual process highway and how tech can help us run skills mapping at the speed and scale needed.
Just FOUR percent of skills initiatives make it to the measurement stage.
And when the whole point of building skills is to drive impact, alarm bells start ringing.
According to LinkedIn, 41% are stuck in planning and 50% make it to activation - which roughly translates to launching or running it in some capacity.
This is causing skills gaps to get worse:
And employees to be more concerned about the state of their skills:
Let’s not sugar coat it.
Most skills initiatives are stuck in the planning and activations stages for this simple reason:
Skills mapping takes too long, because it’s too manual!
And there are three key reasons why doing it manually slows us down.
Basically, you need to speak to managers, employees and subject matter experts to ask:
What skills do you need in your job? And what skills does your team have?
And unless you’re able to do that at speed and scale, things change before you even get a chance to identify the skills you need.
People leave, goals shift and, ultimately, the skills needed evolve.
It doesn’t matter if you’re in a 50 or 500-person business, you’ll never map skills fast enough like this.
We all get sucked into the bubble of our team and department, using niche tools and terminology.
And when it comes to skills, that means we all have our own terms for the specific skills in our team.
We might be talking about the same skill, but using different terms across the business.
And that means it’s really difficult to come up with a universal taxonomy as we go through the skills mapping process.
It’s even harder to then map all of that to the roles that exist in the business.
Let's imagine that by some miracle, you interview everyone, map the skills and agree on a taxonomy…
Now what?
Well, most of the time it all goes into a spreadsheet.
Which seems like a logical idea but actually just sends your skills off to the data graveyard.
It’s just not possible to keep on top of it all at the speed and scale you need to bridge those gaps.
Yes, and it’s the HowNow way!
The time for modesty is over - we’ve wasted enough time manually mapping skills.
We believe you can leverage AI to map skills, and it’s why we created HowNow AI.
Here’s how it works, with the core benefits of skills mappings and key principles of the tech-driven approach.
Using real-time job market data, looking at live job adverts to assess the tasks and responsibilities associated with every particular job on the market.
Then we infer which skills are required and the proficiency levels needed for someone to be able to do that task and responsibility.
Now we have a core skills taxonomy for the jobs that are available in the market. And the goal is to contextualise that based on jobs that exist within your organisation.
Plugging into your HR system, we can look at your jobs, the roles people previously had, and their responsibilities to further contextualise the required skills.
We combine that organisational context with job market macro data to come up with a skills taxonomy - and our taxonomy has just over 40,000 skills.
Now we’re mapping skills in moments, not nine to 12 months!
And with a strong data foundation, so that the mapping you’re doing is benchmarked against the wider market, but brings in the context from within your organisation.
“Getting the business strategy documents and using that to map out what is required, what skills are going to be required, and asking individual teams what their objectives are.” - Joelle Tomkinson.
If we know this, we can ensure we’re aligning to the business strategy and the skills needed when people approach us about learning.
Looking through the lens of the business strategy helps us think in terms of quick wins and long-term value, because we recognise the immediate skill needs and what’s required in the future.
“Find stakeholders that genuinely have a problem you think skills can solve and go after that. Iterate after that, learn, and scale.
“It'll be overwhelming. It'll be terrifying. So just start somewhere where you think you've got a higher chance of success, good stakeholder engagement, good relationships and maybe better sets of data integrity and veracity.” - James Griffin.
This is about stacking the odds in your favour as you start mapping skills.
Where is there a pressing problem you can solve? And who can you help solve a problem by using skills?
And when you succeed, you have a story to tell others about the value of skill-driven learning.
“Go and ask your leaders: Hey, what are the 16 job tasks of business development?”
Why job tasks? Well, in Nick’s view - “Is it even possible to have a skill that does not correlate to job tasks in an organisation?”
If it doesn’t correlate to a task, you can’t practise that skill or measure it effectively.
So, mapping the skills for one job task is a great first step.
“After really unravelling and undoing some of those systems and processes, I got to a point where I could pilot the integration of skills into our performance reviews.
“Which helped us have a holistic view of employee performance. So you can focus on not only what is achieved, but how it's achieved.”
From mapping and measuring skills to closing your gaps and showing ROI, this is your step-by-step guide to skills-led L&D!
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