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Employee Skills Profile for Mobility & Growth: From Siloed Skills to Strategic Advantage
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Summary
Your workforce is your most valuable asset, but are you using their full potential?
Many organizations lack complete and up-to-date employee skill profiles. This deficiency can lead to underutilized talent and missed opportunities. In today’s fast-paced business environment, it’s crucial to have a strategy to maximize your workforce’s capabilities.
Comprehensive and updated employee skill profiles are the key to unlocking this potential. These profiles clearly show your employees’ strengths, weaknesses, and development needs.
Resumes or CVs offer a linear view of a candidate’s experiences and are suitable for hiring candidates. On the other hand, employee skill profiles provide a comprehensive and dynamic picture of an employee’s skill set. This includes their skills, proficiency levels, and experience using those skills. These profiles serve as the essential foundation for employee development and growth, providing valuable insights into the most important “raw material” for an employee’s success – their skillset.
This blog explains the power of employee skills profiling, its components, benefits, and how it empowers businesses and employees. It also provides the easiest ways to start with skills profiling.
Let’s explore the concept of employee skills profiles more to capitalize on the trending business currency—skills!
What is a Skills Profile?
An Employee Skills Profile is a comprehensive record that outlines an individual’s skill set, proficiencies, experience, and qualifications.
Instead of focusing on educational qualifications and achievements, a skills profile considers several data points. These data points realistically enable and determine an employee’s organizational success.
A skills profile typically consists of
- Primary skills (Expert skills)
- Secondary or adjacent skills (advanced and proficient skills)
- Skill proficiencies
- Soft skills
- Validation of skills by managers or SMEs
- Transferrable skills
- Role in the organization
- Trainings completed
- Certifications
- Projects worked on
Employee Skills Profile vs. CV Skills Profile
The main difference between employee skills and CV skills profiles is their focus and purpose. Job seekers design a CV skills profile to acquire a role, which can differ for every job application. A skills profile takes a more holistic approach. It gives a complete overview of an employee’s skill capabilities, highlighting current expertise and potential for development and growth.
The Power of Skill Profiling
Skill profiling offers decision-makers a strategic and comprehensive view of their workforce capabilities and capacity. By identifying employees’ skills and how they apply them, businesses can understand employee’s strengths and weaknesses. This information allows them to align employees accurately with organizational goals.
Why Use Employee Skills Profiles?
Employee skills profiles can unlock a wealth of benefits for your organization, such as understanding the collective skills within your company, optimizing resource mobility, and identifying skill gaps. Listed below are several compelling reasons why organizations should use employee skill profiles.
Gain a Clearer Picture of Your Workforce
Understand your company's collective skillsets, identifying strengths and weaknesses. Live employee capabilities and capacity dashboards allow leaders to make data-driven business and talent decisions about developing or acquiring talent.
Optimize Resource Mobility and Allocation
Match the right people with suitable roles based on their skills and experience across the company.
Identify Skill Gaps and Development Needs
Pinpoint skill gaps and encourage your workforce to upskill or reskill to meet evolving business demands.
Facilitate Career Development
Empower employees to identify their strengths, set development goals, and explore career growth opportunities within the organization.
Build High-Performing Teams
Create cross-functional teams with complementary skills, fostering collaboration and innovation. Promote and reward Consistent High Performers (CHPs) for career development and growth.
For employees, complete and updated skills profiles would mean the following -
Deepen Understanding of Skills
Gaining a deeper understanding of one's skillset can empower employees to take ownership of their career paths within the organization, aligned to their aspirations, mobility options available, and future talent needs of the organization.
Fuel Growth & Career Development
Skills profiles provide managers with visibility into their team’s skill landscape. This visibility facilitates conversations between employees and managers about career goals and highlights areas for upskilling or reskilling.
Boost Visibility
A well-defined profile increases an employee's visibility within the organization, potentially connecting them to new opportunities based on the skills and capabilities of the employee.
Building Effective Employee Skills Profiles
Creating a practical skills profile requires collaboration between employees and the organization. Typically, a skills profile includes data points listed below.
- Functional and Technical Skills: Functional and technical skills with proficiency levels.
- Soft Skills: Include soft skills like communication, problem-solving, and teamwork.
- Experience: Briefly describe the employee’s overall experience, tenure within the organization, and accomplishments that showcase how they applied their skills.
- Projects: A separate focus on the projects the employee has participated in to illustrate their skill applications and expertise gained while working on the project.
- Certifications: Include any relevant certifications the employee has acquired that demonstrate the employee's expertise in specific skills.
- Learning Goals: Outline skill gaps you'd like employees to develop further, demonstrating a commitment to continuous learning.
Employees typically enter the skill and proficiency data themselves, termed employee-declared skills. This employee skills data then goes to their managers for validation and feedback.
Here are some additional tips for building practical skills profiles
- Using a standardized format ensures consistency and easy comparison across different employee profiles.
- Regularly review and update employee skills profile to reflect new skills and experiences.
- Showcase a diverse skillset while demonstrating expertise in specific areas.
Traditionally, employees fill out extensive forms that capture these data points. However, this approach of seeking employee data has seldom worked for organizations to have complete and updated skill information about their employees as they are always busy with increasing work demands and ongoing projects.
An AI Copilot for Talent can help intelligently generate employee skill profiles using existing employee data points available within the organization. This approach means employees do not have to fill out data, which saves them time and energy.
The only information an AI Copilot for talent requires is the company’s employee database, role, and hierarchy. The large skill graph model automatically matches employees with the correct primary and secondary skills.
Spire.AI Copilot for Talent’s cutting-edge SaaS solutions are powered by the world’s largest domain intelligent large graph model (LGM) for skills. We have been instrumental in helping organizations generate employee skill profiles and utilize them for employee development and growth to further their efforts to build a future-ready Skills-Based Organization.
Leveraging Skills Profiles for Optimized Mobility and Resource Allocation
Once you have created employee skills profiles, the next step is to use this rich data to make decisions about your workforce development and growth aligned with the organization’s goals. Several ways exist to do this.
Start by using the data to identify employee skill gaps regarding their current and future successive roles. This will help support employees’ learning and development.
You can set up an internal talent marketplace that fosters internal mobility and paves the way for implementing an internal first strategy. This marketplace uses skills information to match employees with job openings across the company.
You can create personalized learning plans for employees. These plans will help them stay current with their skills and better prepare to meet the organization’s goals. Let’s examine these applications in detail.
Identifying Skill Gaps and Development Needs
A report by PwC found that 77% of workers are willing to learn new skills for their jobs. Creating employee skills profiles is a great way to kickstart this initiative for your organization.
These profiles show where employees need to improve so you can create a personalized learning plan for proactive upskilling and reskilling intervention. This learning path will help employees acquire and replenish skills, improve employee retention, and give them the confidence boost and visibility they need to grow.
In the current business landscape, significant learning and development initiatives are impossible to achieve using manual methods and current talent systems. Building skill profiles takes ages, hindering the identification of skill gaps. Personalized learning paths for upskilling and reskilling remain an action item in the pipeline, leaving your workforce unprepared for the future.
Hence, you must utilize a solution like Spire.AI to help you auto-generate employee profiles using Generative Skills AI. Little intervention will help identify skills gaps for the current or future role and recommend personalized learning paths for employees to progress faster.
Creating a Skill-Based Talent Marketplace
A dedicated skills-based talent marketplace extends the power of employee profiles. You can proactively approach talent management and search for internal talent based on specific skill requirements, maximizing existing resources and reducing external recruiting costs.
Traditional structures leave hidden talents undiscovered. Creating employee profiles takes a long time, and they match employees with internal roles either manually or with outdated systems.
Spire.AI’s Copilot for Talent automatically builds employee skill profiles and suggests new roles for growth, both within the employee’s current area (horizontal) and toward leadership (vertical). This helps you develop your talent internally, reducing turnover.
Building High-Performing Teams with Skills Matching
With an all-inclusive employee skills profile, you can match roles with the right talent by identifying employees with the necessary skill sets. This will foster collaboration and empower learning and development, ensuring maximum positive outcomes for each project.
Matching each employee with the proper role using ERPs can be inaccurate as skills aren’t at the forefront of their talent management models.
Using auto-generated and completed employee skill profiles by Spire.AI’s generative skills AI, you can quickly identify, promote, and reward consistent high performers(CHP).
Furthermore, the solution identifies employee skill gaps and recommends a personalized learning matrix based on the supply-demand ratio of internal jobs. This means the employee can see how many jobs are available for a combination of skills and how many people have applied for them across the organization. This matrix will help employees make data-driven decisions about their growth within the organization.
The Future of Employee Skills Profiles
As technology evolves, so does skills profiling. Integrating a Copilot for AI and Large Skill Graphs like Spire.AI to automate skills identification and analysis can help you automate the generation of employee skill profiles.
Additionally, it will make skills profiling more dynamic, reflecting an individual’s ongoing learning and development journey for the skills possessed and the skills needed by the organization for growth.
Furthermore, integrating employee skills profiles within workforce planning and management will empower organizations to make more data-driven decisions around internal mobility and external hiring. Providing employees with a singular view of their skills profile, growth, and career paths will allow them to self-assess their qualifications and effortlessly prepare for future roles.
Final Thoughts
Employee skills profiles are more than just a record of past accomplishments; they are a roadmap to future success. By embracing skills profiling, businesses can move beyond a siloed view of talent and unlock the full potential of their workforce. From optimizing mobility to fostering a culture of continuous learning and growth, skills profiles are the stepping stone for organizations to transform into skill-based organizations and thrive in a dynamic and ever-changing business landscape. Investing in skills profiling demonstrates a commitment to employee development and talent mobility. This fosters a more engaged and motivated workforce, creating a competitive advantage.
With the business dynamics changing faster than ever, it is essential to ensure you have the capabilities to stay ahead of the curve. Traditional talent management systems can only help you achieve a basic level of competence for workforce development. With AI-driven talent management solutions like Spire.AI, you can fastrack your talent management approach and actively prioritize internal talent.
So, take the first step – begin building comprehensive skills profiles for your employees today. As your workforce grows and adapts, so will your organization’s capabilities, ensuring you continue to grow manifold in the ever-evolving business world.
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