Skills have been in the limelight recently, and for good reason, as they promise a way for businesses to keep on top of the many changes happening right now. From automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to climate change and increasing DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging), building the right skills can help you address some major business challenges. Effective upskilling and reskilling rely on knowing exactly what skills you have currently, what you need, and what people are building through their learning opportunities. For this, you need skills data.
What Is Skills Data?
Skills data encompasses someone’s education, experience, exposure, and environment. It includes data from your learning systems, HR systems (including HRIS), ATS (applicant tracking system) and resume data, performance data (such as peer or manager feedback), and data generated from someone’s everyday work (such as completing a project). Consolidating and analyzing this data enables Learning and HR leaders to make more informed decisions about what learning to offer their people, where to move people for better skills utilization, and what kind of talent pipeline is needed for future strategic initiatives.
Yet, as you can see, skills data can be personal. After all, the decisions you make based on this data will impact the trajectory of someone’s career and livelihood. That’s why every use of skills data needs to put the individual at the center. Employees need to trust in what skills data can do for their careers and in the insights it provides.
Governing the Use of Skills Data
Clear governance is critical to gaining trust in skills data. This will help employees understand how its use benefits them and their employer in a balanced way. HR and Learning and Development (L&D) leaders bear a heavy responsibility on their shoulders to harness the power of skills without compromising trust in skills data or hindering someone’s future career.
Using Skills Data for Good
So how can you use skills data as a positive force in an individual’s career? Taking a skills-first approach to workforce decisions (making it the main and primary deciding factor in offering someone a new opportunity) removes a lot of bias from the process. No longer will you rely on someone’s connections, outdated credentials, or even a manager’s gut feeling to make decisions. Everything will be based on tangible evidence.
Those decisions will be based on more timely measures, too, since in an ideal world, an individual will constantly learn new skills, thereby updating their skills data. Managers will be better able to assess someone’s ability right now instead of relying on a degree or credential acquired decades ago. To put it another way, you may have been able to run a marathon a decade ago, but your recent exercise regime and diet will be a better indicator of your current levels of health and fitness.
The Skills Profile Is at the Center
In a skills-based approach, you’ll likely come across a personal skills profile (also known as a passport in some circles). This is a central point for all of an individual’s skills, learning, career goals, interests, and anything else relevant to their career. When managers use this to assess someone’s ability for a role, project, promotion, or other opportunity, they can be more aligned with the employee’s unique skills and long-term goals. More relevant learning and development can be offered based on this. This creates more meaningful careers, boosting retention and employee satisfaction and enhancing productivity.
As employees begin to benefit from sharing their skills data, they’ll buy into the opportunities more and may even champion skills with their peers. Explaining the benefits of using skills data is quite straightforward. It will help someone uncover new opportunities to advance their career, give them a clear structure for building skills to take the next step in their career, and ensure they remain employable in an ever-changing future.
Transparent Communication Builds Trust
Trust, by definition, hinges on honesty. Being clear about the use of skills data, its benefits, protections, and who has access to it is fundamental to building trust. Transparency is key, and employees should feel empowered to ask questions about the use of their data and who is ultimately accountable for it. Ideally, this individual should be in a leadership role, a Chief Skills Officer, or similar. They will have oversight on all collection, use, privacy, and actions taken based on skills data.
Securing Skills Data
Like all data, security and clear access control is essential. Collaborating with data privacy, legal, and compliance teams also will help to keep you on the right track when using skills data. Work with them to develop the right policies, protections, and mitigations so you can focus on collecting and using skills data for the benefit of your workforce.
A Note on AI
Advances in AI are making it a lot easier for L&D and HR teams to collect and consolidate skills data. While this is a positive development, it’s worth putting frameworks around its use to ensure only the best results are shared for actioning in your workforce, and biases aren’t scaled. Make sure your skills data is accurate and timely. Your AI model needs to be clearly explainable, too, so you can see if there are any inaccuracies or biases influencing results.
Putting People at the Heart
Placing people at the core of your workforce decisions ensures every move you make will be a net positive for individuals. It keeps you on the right side of responsibility and ethics when using skills data. This means you’ll experience the benefits of taking a skills-first approach instead of risking backlash from unethical practices.
