Skill Assessment - Measuring and Addressing the Gaps

A company XYZ is working on identifying the competency gaps in its present workforce. Well, why would it want to do so? How exactly does it benefit from such assessments? Let us consider a scenario to answer these questions. Say, the company XYZ is a reputed digital marketing agency. It believes in the constant need for a workplace to keep evolving. It understands that workplace efficiency is best defined when two jobs can be combined in one.

Now how exactly, should one go about identifying these gaps? Let us briefly point out some of the steps that would help do the same –

• XYZ hired a few fresher’s right out of college. These employees were hired on the basis of the raw skill sets they possess. The raw talent that acted as criteria during the hiring process is what will help XYZ define the training for them to develop their skills and to bridge the gap between the organization’s skill needs and the current capabilities of these newly hired employees. The pieces of training could range from digital marketing training to social media training to digital marketing certifications, aligning the trainees with the concerned projects.

• XYZ is evaluating its present workforce. The term Key Performance Indicator (KPI) can be used here to achieve this goal. A KPI can be defined as a quantifiable metric that reflects how effectively an organization is achieving its desired targets and objectives. It can be used across different departments with the ultimate goal being measuring long term targets. KPIs simply reflect the gaps when targets are not met. In such a case, the points below can help identify these gaps –

1. Listing down the concerned departments and the present skill set of those departments.

2. Surveys can be a useful tool here as well. Surveying the workforce can also help identify the gaps. A person working in the social media department may also be an excellent communicator and his skills might be of more use in the marketing department. The survey can simply help understand the present skill sets of the workforce.

3. Once done with the above steps, it is now time to analyse this data. Data analysis will help figure out the barriers which hamper the growth. It will only help identify the skill gaps in specific departments, but also find potential successors for certain roles and help gauge the future skill requirements.

Measuring competency is an essential to find the gaps that exist between the current workforce and the current and future requirements of a company. This helps not only in building a road map for the future goals, it also lays an emphasis on the identification of required training and development programs for the talent pool within the company. Future benchmarks can be set which could keep the employees competitive and make them understand the need for evolving their skill sets.

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