Burning Questions: How Do We Know What Skills We Should Be Tracking?
Today we’re kicking off a new series here on the Visual Workforce blog. It’s called Burning Questions and it’s focused on answering the questions we hear most commonly when we speak with HR professionals and organizational leaders who are embarking on skills management initiatives.
This week we’re tackling a question that’s fundamental to any skills management program: “How do we know what skills we should be tracking?” It’s a tricky one and the answer will vary from company to company (and even from team to team), but we’ve got some tips to get you started:
Start With What You Already Have
Check Out Your Competitors
“Prospect” for Skills on LinkedIn”
Think Broadly
Start With What You Already Have
This may seem obvious, but if you’ve already got a framework in place from previous attempts at skills management – use that as a starting point! Many organizations have already started down the path to skills management by systematically thinking through the different capabilities they need or want within their organization. If that sounds like you – you can go ahead and skip down to the next tip (consider the 30-seconds a gift, use it wisely!)
Now, if you’re saying to yourself, “but we don’t have anything…that’s why I’m here!” We’ve got news for you. You don’t have to start from scratch – all those job descriptions that your company has written over the years make a great starting point for discovering the different skills, proficiencies, and capabilities that you value for your different positions. The tricky part is that job descriptions are usually written in prose – which means that you’ll want to read through the bullets and distill them down to the different skills they’re really talking about.
Check Out Your Competitors
When it comes to identifying desired skills your competitors’ job postings can be a gold mine. Visit their careers page and look through the different positions that they’re hiring for – not only will this give you insight into the job market in your space (always valuable information), but doing this across a wide selection of competitors will help you identify the skills and certifications that consistently pop up for different job roles.
“Prospect” for Skills on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is another source of valuable information around skills – highly motivated professionals will actually tag their own skills within their LinkedIn profile. Say you want to know what skills might be valuable for a software developer – just search that title in LinkedIn and start browsing some of the promising profiles. You’ll be able to quickly identify trends and get insight into the common skills shared by high performers. And you thought prospecting was just for sales…
Think Broadly
A skill is not necessarily just a functional, job-related capability (e.g. Graphic Design, CSS, C++) – when determining which skills to track it’s best to think broadly and consider all the different categories of skills: job-specific, soft/professional, tools/technologies, personal/hobbies, languages, certifications, industry expertise, etc.
Ultimately what you’re looking to do with any skills management initiative is build a living, breathing library of the skills, proficiencies, and certifications that are critical to the success of your business. While some of these skills may not be immediately relevant to the specific role or project you’re working on today, they can be an incredible source of information about your employees’ unique talents.
If you want to learn more about this topic and the other burning questions that we’ve been hearing from people like you, download our new eBook, “7 Burning Questions in Skills Management.”