Skills tracking in resource management brings numerous benefits that prioritize the well-being and growth of individuals within the organization. Learn what it's all about.
Unlocking the power of skill tracking is one of the keys to effective resource management. According to the Resource Management Institute, a vital factor for successful resource management is a well-designed and maintained skills database.
But surprisingly enough, this practice often gets overlooked and underutilized in many organizations. In the same survey, the RMI talked to consulting agencies and found that most of them still feel their skills tracking and management capabilities need improvement.
Indeed, 60% of respondents said that their current skills database does not serve their business needs.
If you want to improve skills tracking, this article is for you. We're going over the definition of skills tracking, identifying the benefits that come with it, highlighting the best practices you need to follow, and tapping into tips and tricks from professionals with experience in creating and advising on skills management systems.
Skills are a foundational topic for any organization. It's the common thread between sales and delivery...it really gives an understanding of what the company is providing to their clients and their customers. It allows for for trend management...it helps [people] excel in their careers [by] matching them to things that they may want to learn about as well." – Cyd Mills, Strategy & Operations Manager, Instructure.
Skills tracking is a way of recording the skills and competencies of your staff to better understand what talent you have available, and what projects could be matched to them. It involves systematically documenting and evaluating the development, acquisition, and proficiency levels of various skills possessed by individuals in a specific domain or field.
The purpose of skills tracking is to provide organizations with a comprehensive understanding of the skills and abilities of their workforce. It helps to identify strengths and areas for improvement, track progress, and make informed decisions regarding training, career development, performance evaluations, and resource allocation.
With the help of skills tracking you can ensure continuous skills management, spot skill gaps by doing skills gap analysis, see where your people need additional training, and hire staff that are missing from the puzzle altogether.
Skills tracking requires systems and processes to track, monitor, and use information related to staff skills. At a simple level, you’ll need the following.
These are common features of a resource management platform. But if you don’t have the right software for resource management, you may need to think of workarounds using other tools.
Skills tracking can positively impact your business bottom line, efficiency, and effectiveness by:
All of which contribute to the success and financial viability of your business, as Oli Meager, Co-Founder of Skills Collective, explained:
It’s foundational for business success. So often we forget that human capital is the most costly part of any business. Doing business right means we have to be able to manage the skills of our people in the right way. And therefore, skills management isn't just an HR initiative. It's a critical business initiative.
Without a structured approach to it, organizations of all shapes and sizes are going to face costly inefficiencies around skills and people, like overhiring, mismatched project staffing, poor staff satisfaction and turnover. It’s about unlocking time and increasing money."
Hear more from our skills management experts, who joined us for a webinar deep-dive into the topic 🎥
Skills tracking improves business outcomes by creating better understanding and alignment between your sales and delivery teams. Put simply, when your sales team knows what skills are available, they can sell projects that use those skills.
Otherwise, delivery teams are left scrambling to find the people and expertise they need for new work. And that increases costs and risk.
While hiring the best people is essential, so is how you use their time and skills. Being strategic in how you allocate work and always matching the right people to the right projects is a way to keep your projects running smooth, on time, and within budget.
If you can make an accurate assignment in the beginning, you eliminate most of the risk of any sort of hiccup in project delivery, like reassigning, giving away work for free, or making other concessions. The other thing is, knowing what skills your teams have and making sure you're utilizing those in the right places also maximizes their billable utilization," explains Julie McKelvey, RMCP.
Allocating staff to projects that they are skilled for makes it easy to keep everyone engaged and motivated, letting them work on something they are good at and passionate about.
Skills management includes a human element that I really enjoy,’ says Cyd Mills. ‘It means matching people to the right work for the skills that they have, helping them excel in their careers, and matching them to things they may want to learn about as well."
Julie McKelvey agrees, highlighting the impact on client outcomes as wellI as improving resource allocation accuracy, which drives up quality and client satisfaction
Harvard Business Review says companies should consider weaving continuous learning into their company culture. When someone joins your company, they want to see a clear career path ahead of them, the new skills and expertise they can gain in the process. Giving them that opportunity to expand and improve their skills is the way to retain talent and build loyalty.
Skills tracking helps you invest in your most valuable resource – your existing employees. It highlights opportunities to upskill and reskill staff so they’re more valuable and aligned to your business strategy. This can be especially helpful when skills or roles become redundant in your organization but you want to retain the knowledge and expertise of existing staff. This is a cost-effective alternative to expensive layoffs.
Skills tracking doesn’t just let managers allocate resources effectively now – it lets them continue to allocate effectively as their team develops new knowledge. By understanding staff skill development – like new skills gained and levels reached— managers can continue to assign projects that engage, challenge, and build people’s skills and confidence on an ongoing basis.
It also helps you identify potential leaders and understand which skill sets they need to develop to take on key roles in your organization’s future. This is significantly more cost-effective and less disruptive than hiring external talent to fill leadership roles.
Skills tracking can help you preemptively develop training programs to stop any skills gaps from appearing. By having that bird's eye view of your team's talents and your projects you can easily identify upskilling, reskilling, and coaching opportunities, as well as capacity gaps that need to be filled if you’re going to fulfill the demand for your services.
Now that we've defined why skills tracking is important, let's look at some best practices to succeed with the implementation.
The Resource Management Institute suggests following an easy 3-step approach if you want to build and maintain an effective skills database at all times:
As with any database, keeping everything up-to-date requires a lot of manual work and leaves room for human error. However, with the best skills tracking software at your disposal, you can revolutionize your skills tracking approach.
With Runn's resource management software, skills management is an integral part of your resource management capabilities. You get to choose the angle and the granularity level you want to take on your team’s skills.
In the Skills tab, you gain insights into a comprehensive list of skills within your company. By expanding each skill, you can easily identify the individuals possessing that particular skill, along with their corresponding skill levels.
Within the People tab, you have the ability to explore the skillsets of all individuals in your company. This includes the option to search based on team, names, skills, and other relevant categories.
You can also manage skills on a person-by-person basis by looking into the individual profiles of your resources. We recommend managing your skillsets by using our People Tags, where you can check all the skills each person has as well their seniority level in those skills. You can also import skills if you're using some other database and want to seamlessly integrate this information into your Runn account.
To manage existing skills or create new ones, you can go to the Manage skills page and create new skills by clicking the "New Skills" button.
Finally, you can access all available resources and their skillsets from the People Planner by using the "skills" filter to see who has the skills you have selected and what their workload looks like — are they fully booked or still have some time to provide that skill on the new project you're managing?
Tracking your employees' skills is not just an effective resource management approach, it is a business strategy that will help you increase employee engagement and increase overall outputs.
Discover Runn today to see how easily you can manage skills tracking no matter how big your team gets!
