In every modern workforce, skills management and being able to efficiently track skills, is one of the greatest challenges a company has to face.
Without an appropriately motivated, technically strong and innovative workforce, companies struggle to survive the pressure their competition is putting on them as technology develops.
While it might, at first glance, not be as necessary as payroll and other administrative features, lack of thereof is putting you significantly behind competition and competition doesn’t sleep.
So, once you already make sure your employees get their pay on time, buckle up because we are about to focus on one very important process in the core HR tool set.
In this article, we will be exploring:
- The approaches to the most used methods of skills tracking in companies.
- The reasons why you should be implementing a skill tracking software in your company
- The features of skills and training tracking software available on the market
4 approaches to skills tracking in organizations
Organizations tend to use a multitude of systems to manage skills tracking. They are generally bundled into 4 categories, depending on how they approach assessment.
Most of these systems tend to use a 1- to 5-star scale to assess. Another scale that companies tend to use is 1-10. As one might guess, this is not very accurate. There are alternative ways, and we will discuss them later in this chapter.
As a starting point, let’s look at the assessment methods used in companies.
Direct Assessment
That kind of skills tracking strategy involves one individual directly assessing the other. It might be performed as a form of peer review between employees, or could be done by an outside auditing organization.
The approach tends to be expensive as it physically involves the employee and the person doing the assessment.
Pros
- If you hire a professional skill auditing company, you can get customized approach
- In case of hiring an auditing company, your most senior members are not locked up in assessment
Cons
- Consumes substantial amount of time of your employees
- Does not recognize personal efforts
- Likely not exhaustive
- It also needs to be repeated at minimum every year to be effective.
- Need to keep separate training tracker
- Tends to be perceived as lack of trust by employees
- Could hinder your diversity efforts
- Very expensive
Self-Assessment
This method of skills tracking revolves around a member of the company filling surveys, every once a few months.
Scientifically this kind of assessment is prone to Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a domain greatly overestimate their knowledge in that domain relative to objective criteria.
Pros
- It’s faster and cheaper than a direct audit
- It’s simple. No additional training needed to conduct it correctly
- Gives a very rough picture of skills that your workforce has
Cons
- Extremely boring and demotivating for employees to self assess
- This kind of assessment does not capture how much effort people put into their own education
- Does not bring any additional value to employees
- Need to keep separate training tracker
- People tend to overestimate or underestimate their skills all the time
Anonymous Peer Assessment
This approach to skills tracking revolves around peer having to assess each other comments under issues, performance in projects and other fruits of work anonymously.
Pros
- Broad scope of opinions which gives a better understanding of a general picture
- Assessment is done by people who work with each other and observe each other daily
Cons
- Fails to notice effort put into education outside direct domain
- Might create a political environment where people rank one another higher for favors
- Very difficult to do without automated skill management software
- Need to keep separate training tracker
Automated Continuous Skill Assessment
Providing the greatest accuracy at the least amount of effort necessary.
This could take the form of an AI HR system that would to constantly update the progress people make, based on their contributions.
It involves a business process allowing your employees to manage their data, report the courses they finished, track their training data or report new certificates. Such a system could connect to your department systems to look up the individual contributions of the employee.
With the approach, you don’t need to hold separate data regarding training, skills and projects.
Pros
- Shows how much effort an employee is putting in his education
- Is the most accurate and least biased
- Is not expensive with right software tools
- Kill 3 birds with one stone, manage team training, certifications and skills at once
Cons
- Might struggle with huge outliers
- It requires advanced software and cannot be managed with a simple spreadsheet
Who benefits from skills tracking?
There are various job roles that benefit from being able to track employee training and manage certification tracking. Without further ado, let’s dig into the list.
Managers
Managers want to know who in their team can help them solve problems they face in their department.
A skills tracking system would enable a manager to see how the employees are developing, therefore making more informed decisions.
To determine the kind of employee training has to be recommended, so the employees can grow.
Employee training information needs to be easily accessible to managers.
Employees
Properly performed skills tracking can make people feel more in line with their job role.
Not without a reason, 51.3% of Developers on Stack Overflow annual survey advised that the mismatch of skills is the reason why they would quit their company.
Moreover, a long-term research project commissioned by Middlesex University for Work Based Learning found that from a 4,300 workers sample, 74% felt that they weren’t achieving their full potential at work due to lack of development opportunities.
An up-to-date skill tracking framework would allow recommending employees education effectively.
Executives
The keyword here is revenue and KPIs. And these grow when skill management is properly driven by skills tracking.
Built in the management culture can greatly benefit the company bottom line and the efficiency of workforce.
Shareholders & Clients
If the skills within your organization are properly aligned and the company has effective employee training programs in place, the clients are also expected to benefit.
Thanks to better quality of services and products delivered.
The right composition of skills makes innovation bloom, resulting in better competitive advantage. In the end, it could also make the service cheaper for the client.
Features of Skills Tracking Software
At some stage, you might need digital copies of your employee records held by tracking software. To achieve it, you need to access appropriate management tools. Depending on what is your company focused around, you might need different type of skills management training tracker software.
To track your training programs, plan training, certifications. So that users can quickly report certificates and training information.
Whenever it’s visual reports, automated notifications or automated reminders, or perhaps a real-time dashboard what you look for. Your skills tracking software might need it.
However, primarily as a business, you want to have just the key features that are the most important for your company. Built in directly the solution of your choice with appropriate licenses.
To put it short, the choice of the right skills tracking software is crucial to business success.
Training Management
Training tracking helps you to see how your team is progressing, what is the impact of trainings on the workforce.
Perhaps you might need to define your own training modules, and a training tracking module could help with that. Keeping training records is an essential part of the management of employee data.
With so much new training appearing every day on various online course websites, it’s vital to be able to compare the training materials in quality and price and buy just the ones that are in line with the needs of your business and expectations of the team.
Work Institute’s 2018 Retention Report stated that one in four workers leave their jobs. Nearly one-third of that turnover was due to unsupportive management and lack of development opportunities, despite the fact over 84% of the companies agreed they try to invest in employee training.
Certifications Management
Software with that kind of key features is often used to avoid costly fines or when determining compliance to various partnerships.
If the risk of staying non-compliant can be expensive, you need a way to avoid missing certifications and to manage employee certifications efficiently.
Certification tracking software allows to manage employee certifications to maintain compliance.
If a person has soon to expire certifications, the feature of the certification tracking management software can help. Good news, lots of skills trackers also offer certification built in.
Self-service portal
You want to enable your employees to be able to manage what training they have been doing to advance their skills. A self-service portal can help broaden access to trainings and other team opportunities. So, whenever possible, make employees in your business also users of your skill tracking and skills management software.
Live Dashboard
The ability to be able to plan talent is an indispensable feature of a skill and training tracker that is consistently used for planning employee engagement. Tasks such as allocating people based on practice should be collaborative.
Detailed Reports
Keeping track is not only keeping track of skills, but also making sure you can access robust reports that will let you easily understand what can be improved in the organization without the need for repeatable tasks.
Training Courses Recommendations
To make sure your workforce is properly equipped, you need to make sure they can manage their own learning. Normally, an employee would have to review hundreds of courses to determine the ones fitting. Training recommendations could simplify the process.
Conclusions
Keep track of trainings and manage growth of your employees. Organizations far and wide need to make sure their training tracker is in place, to be able to measure the skill set of their staff. Employee skill data is difficult to track due to lack of solid empirical systems and need to be approached with the right software.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skills_management
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020
https://www.mdx.ac.uk/about-us/our-schools/institute-for-work-based-learning
