The bottom line is that you need data – reliable, clean data – on your employee's competencies because a significant proportion of companies don't even know where skills gaps exist. They know they need to address the problem, but many don't know how to bring about substantive change throughout the organization, where everyone buys into the new perspective.  

So, how can you, too, find those efficiencies and bolster them through skills development training? The answer is to find a way to visualize your organization’s skills from a high level before drilling down to the individual level.

Capture your organization’s skills in a single system  

Let's touch upon why it's imperative to rethink employee development. The pace of business isn't slowing down any time soon, and with the rise of remote work options, it's accelerating in many ways. Over the last two years, many companies have inadvertently discovered that they don't need a large facility to operate in the first place. Working online made their workforce more efficient as employees had the flexibility to find their workarounds to complete their tasks.  

However, remote working comes with challenges in managing employees' performance and development. Most companies only rely on simple solutions to store the skills like spreadsheets or some employee evaluation word document. The problem is that the needs of the business change faster than this system can keep up. It gets even more complicated the more extensive your organization gets because the truth is that skills do need updating over time, but all employees should receive the same training at the same time.  

When your organization (have) a single and automated employee development platform to capture your organizational skills, you can start to build a visualization of where your gaps exist and create a skills-based organization. That's what we're talking about because those gaps and lack of insights impede the business most.

Identifying where skills gaps exist

In any context, most of us don’t even know where we are deficient and where we are doing well, and the same concept applies to the business world too. Mature organizations can readily identify where they have competency gaps, hire qualified candidates to fill that need, and reap the benefits to productivity. But what if you have an even better candidate already on your staff who already knows your organization top to bottom?

That's another point we have to make because if you can use a platform to manage all skills data from your employees, pinpoint skills gaps for the roles you need to create innovation - and compare those needs to employees' collective talents – there's a reasonable probability that you don't need to add more workers if one can do the job better.

For example, a content marketing agency can hire a young, talented editor. Still, after a few months, it’s clear that this entry-level professional needs a little assistance on the tech side of their job responsibilities. So, you give that worker training on content management systems and graphic design to catch up, and you may discover that this worker starts to shine once they improve their skill set.  

Improve the employee learning process

The best way to improve an employee's skill set is to bolster the learning process overall. It's not enough to offer training on your entire industry - every nuance and a new platform that hits the market - because you need personalized training that fits employees' competencies and interests.    

Without a doubt, it's easy to lose the reins and get off track with skills development, and developing a single system to visualize skills and build a growth plan is how world-class organizations perform at a high level. At the very least, you can qualify each worker based on technical proficiency with specific systems, but keeping the skills updated and encouraging employees to learn needs a comprehensive process. First, you have to identify critical skills and competencies your organization needs to create a competitive edge ahead of time. Then communicate it to the employees and allow them to connect their development.  

One best practice from Unilever is to train leaders to break roles and projects into bite-sized tasks. Then identify the required skills for each task and the work model that best meets the skills requirement. This practice encourages leaders to look into solutions to develop employees' skills holistically and tap into different types of talent across the organization.  

How about improving the learning process overall? Is it best to make learning fun and implementable, or is it better to take a more conservative, methodical approach? Should leaders hold more frequent inspirational meetings, or are one-to-one, down-to-earth conversations better?

It's questions like those that we hear most often. Hence, we designed our platform to help you visualize your organization's skills to pinpoint where you need improvement or provide genuine opportunities to support employee growth. Through building a personal growth plan that connects to the company's objectives, employees can focus on learning the skills that support their work and create impact.  

In summary

Ultimately, it's not easy to map out your organization's skills and analyze each employee's performance and qualifications against that, so organizations need a dedicated employee development platform to reduce redundant skills data, costs and support the employee development journey.

Talbit is the plug and play solutions for knowledge worker companies, who don’t have talent development processes, are running their talent development in PowerPoints, Excels and Words or have an HR management software but need a more modern and agile people development platform. Interested in seeing the platform in action, talk to our team here