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If you’re lacking visibility into your skills, you’re setting your organisation up to fail!
Without clarity over the skills needed to reach your goals, you’ve got less chance of hitting them.
If you don’t know which skills you have, it’s harder to leverage them to reach goals.
And without either, you don’t know where your biggest skills gaps are - the kind that stop people progressing and you reaching collective targets.
Enter skills tracking and the visibility it brings!
Now we can match people to projects, build the skills we lack, and use skills to drive our business forward.
Ready to build that visibility? Here’s how you tackle skills tracking head on.
There are two core pillars of skills tracking within a business: mapping the skills you need, measuring the skills you have.
If you can tick both these boxes, you have everything you need to keep on top of your skills needs and build the proficiency required to succeed.
The questions you need to ask are pretty simple:
The process is the problem!
Right now, most companies are doing all of this manually, and it takes them as long as A YEAR.
Why? Because they interview managers and employees one by one, struggle to build a skills taxonomy, and end up dumping everything they do find in a spreadsheet.
Have you ever tried tracking moving things in a spreadsheet?
It’s a nightmare! You either never use it, nobody takes responsibility for updating it, or it’s outdated before it’s even useful.
The time for modesty is over—we've wasted enough time trying to manually map our skills!
We believe you can leverage AI to map skills at speed and scale, and it’s why we created HowNow AI.
Here’s how it works (and the key principles that help you understand the approach needed).
Using real-time job market data, we’re looking at live job adverts to assess the tasks and responsibilities associated with each unique 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 in the market, and the goal is to contextualise that based on jobs 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.
And now we’re mapping skills in moments, not those nine to 12 months!
Want to see HowNow AI and our skills mapping in action? Book a demo today!
The second part of the skills tracking equation is measuring your proficiency in those skills.
If we know this, we can work out our skills gaps and target learning to close them.
The two pitfalls here are trying to do it manually and testing for knowledge, not skills.
A one-off test isn’t the way to assess someone’s skills, it’s an indication of their ability to perform on that test.
The best evidence of someone’s ability to execute a skill is in the tasks they perform at work.
That’s why we recommend using a mix of self and peer review - a lighter touch way to measure skills.
An employee ranks themself on a scale from one to five, their manager or peer does the same, and the average is an indication of their proficiency.
Once you’ve published and sent that learning designed to close the skills gaps, your job is far from over!
Remember, it’s skills trackING - present tense, meaning it continues over time.
This is where continuous skills check-ins come in.
Now that someone’s had a chance to put it into practice, apply the skills, and get feedback on their performance, has their proficiency improved?
Again, AI is your friend here. At HowNow, we use it to nudge people and say, you’ve been doing a lot of learning around X, has your skill improved as a result?
They can complete their skills assessment, and that nudges their peers and managers to do the same.
Now you can start continuously tracking whether someone's skill is moving in the right direction or not.
And if it isn't, we can leverage AI to automatically adapt that pathway and start to change the recommendations we're giving them based on their skills progress.
👉👉👉 Download your free guide to skills-first L&D
Skills change over time, sometimes faster than we even notice - if we’re not paying attention.
But when the risk is investing in redundant skills and losing our ability to capitalise on opportunities, it’s our business to keep up-to-date with emerging and shifting skills.
Here are some of the ways we track emerging skills at HowNow, which might help you keep your finger on the pulse.
Which skills are more prominent in job descriptions than they were before?
This not only gives you insight into emerging skills for relevant job roles, it’s great context for your hiring and internal mobility plans.
What are we seeing in research papers? Does the data tell us where our industry or consumer behaviour is heading?
What patents have been filed? These are directly connected to skills that might be relevant in the coming years.
Where is it taking you too long to hire? That indicates competitive recruitment and may be your sign to build the required skills internally.
You can also look at productivity and performance data. We often find that people’s job titles have stayed the same but the tasks they perform and skills they need shift.
Yes, you can sit down to ask people how this has happened, but you can also plug into tools like your CRM to track the new tasks they’re doing.
Where has your business grown, and where is it projected to grow?
Whether that’s in terms of headcount, revenue, or products, this is an indication of where the business needs L&D support.
And it’s likely that this rapid growth has created a need for new skills or a deficit in the skills needed. The bonus is that closing these gaps is directly correlated to the commercial side of your business.
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