In today’s competitive and constantly changing business environment, organizations are trying to stay ahead of the curve. Having an innovative product or service and excellent stakeholder relationships might give you a head start but only scratches the surface of this challenging issue. Strategic hiring, development and retention of talent is vital because only an empowered and skilled workforce will help the organization stay competitive and continue to drive results. This means that an organization’s Learning and Development (L&D) strategy is of prime importance and core to its business operations.
A learning and development strategy identifies the knowledge, skills, and competencies the organization needs and how the workforce can acquire those to ensure profits and sustainability. Having a relevant and effective L&D strategy becomes paramount with the advent of disruptive technology and automation which has led to elimination or structural changes within many job roles. A 2019 McKinsey survey estimated that 87% of the employers feel that there is a rising skill gap in their organization due to these changes. Skills gap analysis — a variant of the more commonly known ‘Training Needs Analysis’, takes a dive deep into the organization’s skill profile to identify the skill strengths, deficits and blind spots, thereby helping inform and augment your L&D strategy. By addressing deficits outlined in the analysis, organizations can future-proof themselves and ensure that its workforce is ready to navigate through changes in a way that continues to drive profits.
Skillr’s behavioural skill assessments that also measure emotional intelligence components transform the way companies build future-proof L&D strategies. Organizations can also maximize returns on their L&D strategy by objectively measuring the skill proficiency of employees over a period of time- before and after training or learning interventions. This kind of longitudinal data provides unparalleled insights that help companies make the right leadership decisions and refine their learning strategy. If you’re considering getting started with Skillr, here’s how you can make the most of the platform to supercharge your L&D strategy:
Identify and Address Skill Gaps
The first step to devise an L&D strategy that works is to identify the skills employees require to perform optimally in their job roles and assess the current proficiency level of these skills. Once this is identified, L&D interventions can be tailored as per the analysis. Skillr’s assessments measure skills with focus area-level precision. These are skills that are required to excel at specific job roles such as inside sales, customer service and first-time managers. Once measured, the future-readiness matrix (shown below), provides a birds-eye view of your team’s overall health by identifying skills strengths, deficits, blind spots, and obstacles. Once these have been identified, it is much easier to address these gaps with the help of Skillr’s tailored recommendations on areas such as:
- Talent Acquisition: Identify the skills to look out for in new hires so that they can hit the ground running and objectively raise the bar by filling in the skill deficits and blind spots.
- Talent Development: Design training and learning interventions to ensure the employees develop the skills which are important but not reliable across the organization.
Create Individualized Development Plans
Skills assessment as a prerequisite to planning the L&D strategy allows organizations to understand each employees’ individual strengths and areas of development. Identifying low and top performers within the same team can help organisations close the performance gap between different employees and provide deeper insights on how to develop each employee in their own unique way.
Another excellent example of customised development pathways is Skillr’s People Potential Matrix (shown below), which compares actual performances with predicted potential to identify nuanced growth strategies for various categories of performers in the team, such as self-sufficient superstars to risky prospects who require training. For example: Low performers may require skills training or coaching to improve while high performers may need to be retained with development plans and reward and recognition practices.
Smart Succession Planning
Conventional succession planning relies on measures like tenure and functional performance to make promotion decisions which often lead to the wrong people being promoted as leaders. This can bring down the morale and productivity of the entire team. It is also important to remember that the skills required to perform a functional role differ from the skills required to excel as a leader. Using skills assessment for succession planning solves this issue and ensures the right people are promoted. With Skillr’s specialized leadership potential assessments, you can measure your employees on skills required to succeed in a leadership role. Furthermore, it helps you to identify talent with untapped leadership potential and people management skills, despite their tenure or past leadership experience. Investing in the development of such talent will not only engage and but also retain these emerging leaders of the organization.
👉Read more: Are you promoting the right people?
Objectively measure the impact of L&D interventions
Although organizations spend a lot of money on their L&D programs, executive board members often complain about the lack of tools to objectively measure the return of investment (ROI) which is required to justify the costs and benefits to various stakeholders. Longitudinal skills assessment before and after learning interventions are implemented is one way to solve this problem of intangibility. Skillr’s assessments measure and quantify skills to provide real-time insights on individuals as well as teams. Using the results of these longitudinal assessments, business leaders can measure the effectiveness of their training interventions and take decisions about continuing, improvising, or discontinuing the implemented intervention in an objective, data-driven manner.
Simply put, skills assessments can propel organisations to strengthen their L&D strategy, which in turn provides a competitive edge that helps attract and retain talent, build an employer brand, develop and leverage people capabilities and consequently keep the workforce engaged, motivated, and retained for the long-term.
