What is skills management?
Skills management is the practice of understanding employees’ talents and discovering how to develop and use those talents in the workplace. When done well, skills management can identify the qualities needed to perform tasks in a company and determine how to assess and map those talents. Then the company can make strategic decisions based on the results.
Skills management software can help companies assess and track employees’ skills. These tools simplify recruitment, hiring, retainment, and strategic planning.
How to implement skills management
When starting a skills management program, organizations should take a slow and methodical approach. The following four steps are essential to introducing skills management to a team:
- Curate a skills framework. Reflect on the most important skills and competencies the company needs. Create a clear framework that groups skills by departments and roles.
- Assess employees. Carefully choose the best assessments to evaluate employees’ skills. Then, administer these assessments to determine proficiency levels.
- Create a visual overview. Once data has been collected, organize it visually in an easy-to-read way, such as a skills matrix, which can allow management to keep track of employees' competencies.
- Analyze and develop. Analyze the data to decide who could benefit from more courses and professional development. Make sure to update matrices as necessary.
Skills management is a cyclical process. As an organization’s plans and goals evolve, it will be important to revisit the steps from the beginning.
Benefits of skills management
When approached in an organized, thoughtful way, skills management can provide many benefits to a company. Some of these benefits include:
- Provides a clear awareness of the talents needed for the future success of the business.
- Matches open positions with best-fit new hires.
- Helps decide which employees could benefit from continuing education and tuition reimbursement.
- Improves employee satisfaction by guiding workers to feel more competent in their roles.
- Closes existing gaps through upskilling, teaching employees new skills.
- Helps when assembling specialized teams by ensuring team members possess the right combination of talents.
- Improves succession planning by identifying and preparing future leaders at the company. Succession planning software can be used to easily create a plan to retain top talent.
Basic elements of skills management
Many businesses turn to software to simplify the process of skills management. Most of these programs offer the following elements:
- Skills assessments: An assessment will clarify the qualities an employee has and the level to which they have mastered those talents. An assessment can take a number of forms, such as quizzes, checklists, or experiential tests.
- Skills matrices: Skills management software relies on matrices to provide a snapshot of talents available across employees. A skills matrix provides a visual representation, such as a table or dashboard, with employee names down one side and skills across the other. Skills matrices can be created for the organization as a whole or for individual teams.
- Strategic planning: Comprehensive skills management involves predicting attrition and demand. Most software allows users to analyze workforce data and make predictions for resource planning.
- Talent finders: Skills management software often offers a search function to assist in talent acquisition. When compiling a team for a new project, users can set criteria to look for existing employees with the right skill sets.
- Course libraries: Some skills management programs embed course libraries. When assessments show that an employee has gaps, he or she can take continuing education courses directly from the software.
Skills management best practices
When implementing skills management within a company, it's essential to keep three best practices in mind.
- Keep it simple. As with almost any initiative, it is best to start small and slow. Trying to identify and improve all skills company-wide may be overwhelming. Consider starting with identifying essential talents or qualities for the organization. Then tackle the top skills needed in each position.
- Encourage employee buy-in. Employees know their roles best. Let them create a list of essential skills needed. Also, communicate with employees when these talents need to evolve and empower them to determine how they will continue to grow professionally.
- Use software. Skills management software is a great way to implement a unified system of assessing, tracking, and developing skills across an organization. These tools allow a more organized approach to skills management, making isolated spreadsheets and forms a thing of the past.
Skills management vs. competency management
While often used interchangeably, skills and competency have somewhat different meanings.
Skills are the types of tasks an employee knows how to complete. Competency is how those skills are applied behaviorally in the workplace. For example, an employee may have a skill, or know how to complete a certain task. However, he or she might not have competency, or the ability to perform that skill well in the workplace.
Skills management, then, refers to understanding and developing the qualities of employees in the workplace, while competency management refers to understanding and developing how they can perform those talents as competently as possible.
Kelly Fiorini
Kelly Fiorini is a freelance writer for G2. After ten years as a teacher, Kelly now creates content for mostly B2B SaaS clients. In her free time, she’s usually reading, spilling coffee, walking her dogs, and trying to keep her plants alive. Kelly received her Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Notre Dame and her Master of Arts in Teaching from the University of Louisville.
