Ongoing innovation and business agility are imperative in today’s competitive world. Organizations must continuously evolve to keep up, shifting from understanding work in terms of fixed, static jobs, to a dynamic landscape of skills which can be deployed and acted on as needed.
Instead of putting someone on a project based on reporting lines or roles, staff are matched with projects that fit their interests and skills. Rather than looking at job postings or reaching out to their networks, staff are served customized opportunities based on their unique skill set. Leaders and managers get real-time insight into the skills makeup of their workforce and how this can impact work processes and business outcomes.
This is a people-centric future that means better outcomes for the business, teams and each individual person.
But how can you actually start applying a skills-based approach to workforce planning?
It all begins with embracing skills management
Skills Management and skills management software is all about understanding the skills of your workforce in a transparent, scalable way. Measuring those skills through a structured subjective assessment process, and then acting on the skill gaps and strengths of your workforce.
- For workforce skill gaps, it’s all about how they can be closed. This might be through learning and development, training, or mentoring.
- For workforce skill strengths, it’s all about how you can allocate those people to work, so that they are happy and your customers are happy.
Let’s say one of your major customers comes to you wanting to migrate their on-premise infrastructure to the cloud. You want to make sure you’re keeping this customer happy and want your A-team on it. Unfortunately, someone has left the business, another is on holiday. How do you find people from across your organization to fill in the skill gaps of this project?
You don’t want to trawl through CVs, and everyone is now working remotely so it’s hard to quickly ask around the office. With Skills Management software at your fingertips, managers can now have a central location to source skilled employees from.
By focusing on skills, employees that might have fallen through the cracks could be given an opportunity to join a project or team they might not have been able to in the past, allowing them to use their skill set to its fullest and giving you the best person for the job.
A win-win situation.
Finding skilled workers in real-time
That all sounds great, but what might it actually look like?
When you have your data in order, finding the right skilled employee becomes easy. All you have to do is search for the criteria that meets your objective.
In this example, I am looking for someone in my organization that is:
- Skilled in assembly efficiency
- Skilled in equipment maintenance
- And is based out of Sydney, Australia.
In seconds, I should be able to find who meets these targets, and who might be a close match.
Are you interested to see how you can begin applying skills management to your strategic workforce planning? Now is the time to book in a demo of Skills Base, and discuss your requirements with the knowledgeable team today.