Skills Profiling
Reviewing your financial position is fairly straightforward – your income, expenses, profit and loss figures are all calculated with a monetary value. Understanding the current, latent and future skills mix, strengths and development gaps of individuals and for workforces can be difficult and the help use:
- A skills stock take identifies the total skills in your workforce
- Competency profiles for job roles which gives you a way of describing and measuring the skills you need and;
- Capability frameworks for organisations, projects, industry sectors and regions which means you are able to measure skills and competencies, KPI’s and targets, values and behaviours.
A Skills Stock take™ looks at where you are now and where you want to be with a detailed training needs analysis. Training Needs Analysis pin point’s gaps and helps to prioritise development needs to support your business plans and goals, whether it’s moving into a new market, restructuring, harnessing latent capabilities or transitioning.
For individuals and solo entrepreneurs – Using skills profiles to define individual capability in a workplace context can support recruitment, job matching, career development, performance management, succession planning and knowledge management. For solo entrepreneurs a skills profile outlines what you can do, it’s your own capability statement for winning jobs, developing proposals and providing services.
For teams – Building a picture of a team’s capability involves developing individual profiles and aggregating the results. This concept can be applied to any group within an organisation such as a business unit, department, location and all people in a specific job role.
The common strengths, that are specific skills found in a majority of individual’s profiles, can be used to describe the team’s capabilities. The identification of prioritised development needs through the skills stock take process is equally important. An evaluation of the team’s strengths (skills held) and development needed (skills gaps) will identify areas for improvement such as recruiting new team members with the [gap] skills required or up skilling across the team or structural change through job redesign.
For organisations – Profiling the capability of an organisation, or of a large group, using skills recognition, can be undertaken using a variety of methodologies. Individual profiles can be aggregated at an organisational level, specific job roles may be a priority and therefore profiled first or solely, or an approach using a sampling technique across the organisation and at different job levels can provide a picture that can be extrapolated to represent an organisational profile.
For clusters and networks – Skills can also be used to measure the capability of a cluster or network of businesses or a skills ecosystem via a skills stock take process. This involves profiling a sample of employees across different job roles and levels including management, administration, sales/marketing and technical areas. Information can then be aggregated to provide the CEO or business owner with a picture of the skills within their business and their development needs. A comparison or benchmark can be undertaken of the business profiles against each other and against the requirements of a major project or expectations of supply chain partners.
For industry – Identifying the current skill level of an industry through a skills stock take process and identifying the key training needs can be undertaken in a variety of ways. A sampling technique can be used for industry skills by profiling a ‘representative’ group of workers across a number of different enterprises. This process can be undertaken on site with questioning around what can you do? what do you know? and so on.
For regions and communities – Using a change management and community capacity building approach, skills profiling can also describe the skills, capabilities and human capital or assets within a region or community.
Profiling small businesses or community members within a town, or an indigenous community can provide information far broader than skills strengths and training needs. The analysis of the current picture gained through skills identification/recognition, with the future picture of where the region/community wishes to be in terms of economic development, sustainability and the labour force, can value add to the community planning process, support structural adjustments (particularly in a workforce context) and/or identify areas for community growth. The growth areas may relate to new business development, regional context and focus on population/skill set demographic change.
