Why Companies Need to Build a Skills Inventory
Here’s a
question every leader should answer: Do you have a clear understanding of your
people’s skills, and where the gaps are?
Odds are, the answer is no. Although the
cloud, digitization, and the Internet of Things allow businesses to gather and
analyze all sorts of data, few organizations today have a system in place to
track the skills they have. And even fewer apply that knowledge to gauge what
skills they lack, both now and in the future — which presents a challenge,
given that in tomorrow’s automation- and data-driven workplace, talent will be
scarce and the needs of your organization will change often.
It’s
clear that digital disruption is already here. In our Workforce
of the Futurestudy, which draws on research begun in 2007
by a team from PwC and the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilisation
at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, we envision what the
workforce will look like in 2030. While it’s impossible to predict exactly the
skills businesses will need even five years from now, every scenario we imagine
will require workers and organizations to be ready to adapt. PwC’s most
recent CEO survey found that more than half of CEOs said
they were exploring how machines and humans can work together. And 39 percent
said they’re considering the effect automation will have on their workforce.
Even now, with automation still in its early
days, CEOs told us that finding the skills they need has become the biggest
challenge to their business — a situation that will only get more acute as
technology evolves and competition for talent tightens. Companies in a range of
industries are scrambling to find people who can work with AI or train
industrial robots, disciplines that may have been esoteric just a few years
ago.
Given the dynamics, it is vital for you to
have a system in place that can track and analyze the skills your people
already have — and those they may need soon. Building such a system is a
significant undertaking. Breaking it down into four steps can help you get
started.
Step
1: Make an inventory of your people’s dynamic skills.
Before
you can even begin to think about the future, you need to know what skills your
people have. Start by considering the particular skills your business needs,
and then categorize them. This categorization could be done by functional
skills, such as financial modeling or accounting, or by technical skills, such
as programming. While doing so, you should also categorize the level of
those skills, from novice to expert. It’s also important that employers look
beyond workers’ job titles to consider what skills they have that they may not
be using.
Next, think about the best way to inventory
those skills. Organizations that are small- to medium-sized don’t necessarily
need a high-tech solution to create this inventory — it could be a simple
system in conjunction with your HR platform, or even just a spreadsheet.
Larger companies with hundreds or thousands
of employees will need a more advanced technological solution, such as an app.
At PwC, we created a widely available app called Digital Fitness Assessment.
We’ve been using this easy, intuitive workforce platform to help our people
assess their own technology skills and create personal learning paths to
improve professional development. Imagine if your organization had a candid
assessment of your people’s digital proficiency.
Creating an inventory can’t be a one-time
exercise, or a static project. You’ll need to update it as your people’s skills
evolve, as your organization’s needs change, and as people come and go.
Step
2: Organize your inventory.
Once
you have the basic inventory in place, begin to organize it in a way that makes
it highly searchable. The key here is to make sure you can search and access
the data quickly, with good results. The inventory won’t be useful if you can’t
efficiently search for a specific skill or attribute, or easily access the
information you need.
Free-form keywords aren’t reliable, because
someone might refer to a certain skill using one term, while someone else might
call it something different. One person’s “coding” might be another person’s
“software writing,” or people may describe sales skills in fundamentally
different ways. So it’s critical to figure out how you can organize the data to
produce useful query results. Or you can implement a powerful search engine
that doesn’t rely on how the data is organized. PwC has developed an app
for clients, called Fathom, which scans for skills across numerous and
disparate databases and uses AI to prioritize search results.
Step
3: Analyze your skills.
With
the data in place, you can begin analyzing it. This can be simple (comparing
rows on a spreadsheet) or more complex (using people analytics or apps to find
and assess certain skill sets). The goal here is to gain insight into where
your employees’ skills are the strongest, where they’re thin, and where the
gaps are, and then whether those gaps are on the functional side or the
technical side.
As with building the inventory, analysis
isn’t a one-time exercise. How closely you track your people’s skills depends
on the needs of your business. In manufacturing or retail, where a lot of
people may be doing the same job, you might not need to track skills too
closely (unless you’re looking at roles you’re seeking to transform). But if
your organization demands certain unique skill sets, such as those in financial
services, pharmaceuticals, or some highly technical industries, you’ll want to
give skill tracking more time and attention.
Step
4: Plan for the future.
Once
you’ve built an inventory and analyzed your people’s skills, you can start
planning for the future. Trying to gauge the skills your company will need two
to three years down the road with a few viable scenarios can be a valuable
exercise. Rather than being caught off guard by a sudden gap in skills or
having to hire people with certain skills at the last minute in the open
market, companies armed with such knowledge can plan ahead through hiring,
training, and career development strategies.
These
steps inform a broader workforce
strategy. It’s important not to forget that planning
your strategy shouldn’t happen in a vacuum — it should always be connected
to larger, unified business goals. All functions must work together to build a
skills plan for the future.
There’s a lot we don’t know about tomorrow.
But workers and organizations should be as ready as possible. By identifying
the skills you need and starting to concentrate on how to build them, you’ll be
better prepared for the changes coming your way.
Jeff Hesse
https://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Why-Companies-Need-to-Build-a-Skills-Inventory?gko=8b016&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20171102&utm_campaign=resp
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