Today, skills are the main factor used to define employment, including how we use people, manage careers, and even pay employees. Organizations that struggle to match abilities to tasks run the risk of falling behind others that can more quickly deploy personnel with mission-critical skills. The organization’s major hub for skills consulting is HR, which creates skill programs that are timely, pertinent, and adaptable enough to support the goals of the company through talent development, skills assessment, and employee reskilling. What is skills based talent management?
What is Skills Based Talent Management??
Skills-based talent management puts skills first. It places more emphasis on a person’s abilities than on their position or place within the organization. That may appear to be a subtle difference. The change, however, is substantial.
A Communications Director does not necessarily need to have excellent communication skills, according to skills-based talent management. Strong communication abilities are cited as being crucial for a variety of jobs and roles, including those of communications specialists, customer service agents, delivery drivers, project and program managers, and leaders at all levels of the organization. This implies that a person with strong communication skills can contribute significantly across the entire organization, not just in the role they currently hold.
The Value Of Skills And The Need For Agility
The ability to move fast and easily is agility. We are all familiar with this term, which originated in athletics but has more recently been used in the workplace. One of the most popular terms in business today is “agile.” Although its roots are in software development, this attitude has been used in practically every other area of business. Fundamentally, this is due to the fact that agility is about how businesses adapt to change, and there are a lot of things that can change in the modern world.
Advantages Of Skills Based Talent Management
A skills-based approach to learning, performance management, and talent management benefits both employers and employees. Employees enjoy their jobs more as a result, and managers and employees perform better at their jobs.
Skills-based learning and performance management gives employees:
More career flexibility: Staff members are aware of the qualifications required for a variety of positions across the company. Employees can have more control over their careers both within and across companies by pursuing opportunities for skills-based learning and development that match desired roles.
Recognition for contributions, not background: According to global professional services firm Deloitte, in a skills-based organization, “workers are valued and rewarded for their skills and how they apply them to create organizational value, rather than for their title, level, or educational degree.””
A future-proofed career: Employees keep all doors open for future career paths and opportunities — including some that may not even be envisioned today — by continuously developing skills that are required in the workplace and investigating new projects and roles.
Skills-based talent management unlocks workforce potential for organizations, with:
Increased organizational agility: Leaders can expand the talent pool, redeploy skills, and unlock workforce capacity by having clear visibility into the skills and competencies of their workforce and an understanding of the skills the company needs.
Greater Employee Engagement: Employees are more engaged at work when they have more control over their jobs and careers. Reduced turnover, increased productivity, and higher retention are all observed at the company.
Improved organizational alignment: Due to the company’s strategic goals being explicitly linked to management and workforce competencies, the entire organization becomes aligned on the competencies that are essential and highly valued for the organization to succeed.
A workforce that is prepared for the future: Companies benefit from a workforce that is prepared for the future by closing skills gaps in the workforce and fostering a culture of skill development aligned with company goals. This workforce will be able to adapt to shifting trends, needs, and priorities.
Important Steps To Develop A Talent Management Program
1) Identifying your organization’s strategic goals
2) Identifying what skill sets are needed to achieve those goals
3) Analyzing your current workforce against those skill sets to identify potential skill gaps
4) Developing a plan for closing those skill gaps through employee training and development
Acquisition Of Talent
Although time-consuming and expensive, recruitment can be effective in filling gaps quickly. Outsourcing work can be inexpensive, but how can we be sure that the right skill gaps are being filled with top talent? The ability to invest in the most important people is one of the benefits of using skills-based insights for hiring talent. These insights not only help you better align the needs of external investors.
Developing internal candidates has the additional unintentional benefit of helping to keep the fundamental domain knowledge acquired through work experience. Something that new employees might find difficult to understand for months or even years.
A scenario using a skills based approach to talent acquisition might follow these sequential steps:
- What are our skill gaps, and what success factors depend on them?
- How do we distinguish between a role that assumes a candidate has these skills and one where we actually lack them?
- What effect is the particular skills gap having on our employees, department, or organization?
- Based on the required skill set, should we outsource this workflow or this role?
- Do we employ a targeted skills approach when hiring?
- How will we know if the needed skill has been successfully hired?
Development Of Talent
Building a positive workplace culture and enhancing employee experiences both depend on developing internal talent. Because stagnation in one’s career is never a good thing,
A skills-based approach to talent development is centered on clearly understanding the current skill gaps and strengths of your employees and then taking proactive action in response to these insights. What training programs are offered by the company to fill any gaps in skills, if any? Who in the company possesses the highest caliber of abilities to coach or mentor an individual?
A skills-based approach offers a strong data source to identify what training is effective and ineffective in addition to allowing for action based on those insights. Is training effective if ten people complete a course with no improvement in skill and competency? The ROI will become much clearer very quickly, and L&D teams and department heads will be able to better allocate training budgets.
Here are a few questions a skills based talent development manager might ask:
- Are we enhancing our employees’ skills in a way that meets our current need for skills?
- Are we preparing our workforce for future roles and/or skills?
- Do we have career plans based on our skills?
- Internal promotions are taking place?
Do our talent development programs match the skills gaps we need to fill? (This would cover both present and future positions, but it would also cover the following initiatives: leadership programs, secondment programs, training courses, on-the-job training, and the formation of specialized teams.
Does the need to produce a measurable ROI drive the development of programs?
Embrace A Skills Based Talent Management Strategy
Identification and development of skills within your current workforce are the main goals of skills-based talent management. This approach is a logical outcome of the transition in today’s economy to a knowledge-based system where employees’ intellectual capital is given more weight. It’s surprising how few businesses currently use this idea, despite the fact that it may seem like a straightforward one. For businesses that heavily rely on job titles and descriptions to understand what work needs to be done, a change in perspective is necessary.
Managers must first comprehend the tasks associated with each job and evaluate each employee’s strengths and weaknesses in relation to those tasks in order to start down this path. For this, the statement “We need an experienced marketing manager” must be changed to “We need someone to write press releases.”
Once you are aware of the qualifications needed for each position, you can either develop a training program to assist people in acquiring these qualifications or search within your company for someone who possesses them. A junior marketer who would benefit from additional training in public relations may be found in accounting, or you may find someone in marketing who is excellent at writing press releases.
If you haven’t already done so, you should be aware that changing the status quo is not something you should do casually. It necessitates a carefully thought out and carried out transition strategy, backed by a convincing business case for change.
Conclusion
When skills are used as a standard across diverse HR programs, they take on the role of the framework for work management. Employees can concentrate on skill development and career alignment while employers can concentrate on the skills they require, either by acquiring or developing them through workforce planning and supporting activities. Together, employers and employees determine the potential contribution of talent and base pay practices and other talent decisions on that understanding. The idea of a job may possibly change in the long run. Without the typical job transfer, organizations can match employees to projects or important work that best utilizes their skills.
