What is a skills inventory?
How many times have you been surprised to discover that the colleague you work closely with has a past job or set of skills that you had no idea about? Aggregated across an entire organization - the chances are you’re already sitting on a gold mine of talent, you just don’t realize it.
A skills inventory provides a snapshot of employee skills (both past and present) and can also include education, qualifications and experiences.
Why capture employee skills?
Given the current challenges of attracting and developing talent, the business case for understanding the skills and capabilities of your people has become even more urgent. I’ve picked out some key examples across the employee lifecycle.
- Workforce planning - a solid understanding of existing workforce skills enables you to make more informed plans and budgets about the talent you need to buy, build and borrow.
- Recruitment and internal mobility - the right tools can help recruiters find internal talent, boosting internal and project mobility and also helps provide justification to invest in external channels when internal sources are exhausted.
- Learning and development - a good understanding of baseline skills allows learning teams to focus their efforts and investment on critical skills needed to help the organization reach its goals and even offer personalized learning at scale.
- Succession planning - the ability to identify the skills of your critical talent and compare that to the rest of the workforce enables faster and less bias prone succession planning and potentially reveals hidden and diverse talent.
- Employee retention - organizations that understand where their critical skills reside and can overlay that against market-demand are also in a strong position to focus their employee engagement and retention efforts on their most high value talent to help reduce employee turnover.
Increasingly, leading edge organizations are taking it one step further and capturing employee career goals, aspirations and the skills they most want to learn into the mix so that both organizational and employee objectives are aligned. A win:win.
Viewing talent through a skills lense increases access to potential talent
It’s hard for most of us to identify how our current skills could transfer into a different role or setting but when talent is viewed through a skills lens, our existing talent pipelines and employee career pathways widen considerably. (Hear more about how Reece is using employee skills to widen talent pools in the HR Leader Podcast)
For example, software engineers share many of the core skills as accountants and database administrators make excellent candidates for future data scientists. Leveraging skills data to help employees, recruiters and hiring managers broaden their view will help you fill critical roles faster and offer better career opportunities for employees.
How do you get visibility of employee skills?
If you’re being asked to provide skills data to your CHRO or board, here are our top tips to capture your employee skills inventory:
- Review what’s available in your HRIS - many allow employees to create an internal skills profile.
- Create a skills-survey - consider which skills you care most about then ask employees or managers to self-rate.
- Aggregate skills data from existing systems - if you’re fortunate enough to have an internal data team, they may have NLP tools that can aggregate skills data from your ATS, LMS and performance management systems.
- Find a trusted partner - find a vendor (like GoFIGR) that can rapidly predict and infer skills with just a simple Excel extract from your payroll or HRIS system, or work with you to unlock skills data scattered across core and HR systems.
What is GoFIGR?
GoFIGR is a talent insights and opportunity marketplace helping forward thinking HR leaders understand their employees’ skills and career aspirations and matching them to internal opportunities to develop and grow.
Helena Turpin spent 20 years in talent and HR innovation where she solved people-related problems using data and technology. She left corporate life to create GoFIGR where she helps mid-sized organizations to develop and retain their people by connecting employee skills and aspirations to internal opportunities like projects, mentorship and learning.
