Make skill insights your competitive edge.

In 2017, Nick Stanley was running the APAC division of Tribal Group, a global IT business developing an ERP platform for education. As Managing Director, Nick oversaw a regional team of more than 250 technologists with a diverse range of skills.

The problem was, there was no way to easily tell who had what skills!

For Nick, this was a conundrum that needed to be solved.

Step one was to review job descriptions, but they only provided a small insight—not nearly enough. The HR system was also of no help.

LinkedIn was another consideration, but it lacked the connection to Tribal’s skills ontology and didn’t verify skill levels; it was binary—either skilled or not. Not useful.

So, the team embarked on a company-wide skills assessment, recording the results in a spreadsheet. On the face of it, it seemed like an easy solution.

It wasn’t!

It took nearly a year to consolidate all the skills data only to then discover the spreadsheet approach was woefully inadequate. It quickly became apparent that managing assessments, updates, team formation, searching for skills, etc, in a spreadsheet just wasn’t going to work.

Around that time, Nick met Steven George (now our Chief Product Officer).  Steven had been managing tech teams for several years and came up against the same challenges that Nick had. However, Steven had been working hard on a system and methodology for managing this which was seeing success in solving the problem for some large international clients.

One day they got to talking about the skills challenge Nick had faced at Tribal and Steven related back the platform he had built and had then deployed with some early clients.

Nick was simply amazed!

It was exactly what he had needed at Tribal Group. It would have streamlined the process of building a skills ontology, assessing skills, maintaining them, and developing skill insights. What took him nearly a year to cobble together into spreadsheets could have been achieved in less than a week.

Nick was sold.

Steven and Nick quickly agreed to join forces. They also invited Nick’s good friend and colleague Michael Mckeand (ex co-founder at Sky Software which Michael and Nick had previously sold to Tribal Group in 2014) to join the founding team as a director and investor. Together, they all embarked on a mission to help organizations become skills based.

Since launching in 2019, we’ve helped some of the world’s largest organizations build a skills ontology, assess their skills, and unlock the huge benefits from this rich vein of information. We now have well over 400 enterprise customers and are growing rapidly in key markets including North America, the UK, Western Europe and APAC. We are recognized as a global expert at helping organizations build a skills ontology, develop an assessment model, manage skill insights and act on the outcomes.