Prime Ideas To Pinpoint Gaps

In this way, you can identify hidden gaps and increase performance with a targeted assessment of employee skills

How do you discreetly address strengths and weaknesses? Is there a cost-effective way to evaluate the productivity of your remote workers at an individual AND group level? The good news is that a competency matrix can help you uncover hidden weaknesses and continuously improve performance in the workplace with a personalized training strategy.

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Fundamentals of Education and Retraining: How to Address the Emerging Challenges of the Future of Work

Discover How to Cultivate Core Competencies and Build Critical Skills to Overcome Obstacles While Working Remotely!

First things first … What is a competency matrix?

Skill mapping is sometimes also referred to as competence mapping, as it gives you a detailed overview of the talents and potential for improvement in your employees. In most cases it will be a table or grid with an employee’s name in each row and different core competencies in the columns. For example, the first row is Employee A, and you can rate his or her performance on the job in 10 crucial areas (communication skills, problem solving, etc.).

Many organizations use special rubrics or criteria for assessing knowledge and skills. 10 could be very competent in this area while 1 indicates that the employee needs to work on these skills. Another approach is to rate them on a scale from exceptional to unsatisfactory rather than a numerical value.

What skills should top performers have?

Of course, the skills you need to develop in your workforce will depend heavily on your goals and any resulting gaps. However, here are a small selection of skills employees should develop to improve job performance and achieve company goals:

Creative problem solving
Social skills (communication, empathy, active listening, etc.)
time management
team building
Organization and planning
coping with stress

Before developing your first employee skills assessment, it is important to determine exactly which skills you are looking for and why. This is usually based on the roles and responsibilities of the employees. For example, you will likely need to create a separate competency matrix for each department or position to allow for accurate comparison and assessment. On the other hand, you can also design a master matrix or a skills inventory test for a company-wide overview. For example, to quickly determine which team members are prepared for leadership roles.

Insider tips for assessing employee skills

How do you get all the competency-based data for your newly created competency matrix? These insider tips can help you research your workforce’s performance, uncover underlying gaps, and improve skills mastery in record time.

Start competency-based learning initiatives

A good way to track employee development is to map skills through courses or learning pathways. For example, you can create competency-based learning plans that are linked to your professional tasks or roles. This gives you the opportunity to focus on specific attributes they need to provide great service, increase monthly sales, etc. You can also focus on targeted practical talent versus generalized skills that may be outside of theirs professional framework. Do you really need your customer service reps who are familiar with warehouse security protocols or inventory organization? Each team member should be able to focus on competencies that are relevant to their department and position, rather than trying to spread too thinly. Likewise, competency-based programs allow you to assess your skills on a case-by-case basis rather than using the same skill building rubric for each employee.

Focus on qualitative versus quantitative

Skills are difficult to quantify because it is about application in the real world. It is therefore important to develop reports that focus on qualitative rather than quantitative data. To put things in perspective, compliance guidelines often involve a mastery of knowledge. Employees must assimilate and maintain policies and protocols in order to use them at work. On the other hand, upgrading and retraining often requires practical experience. For example, simulations, scenarios and certification paths help you test your ability to apply certain skills in the workplace and identify underlying gaps.

Request for team feedback

What skills are necessary for a job? Peers give you an inside perspective on the core competencies and talents employees need to achieve their full potential. So, ask for team feedback in the form of polls, polls, and interviews. In some cases, you can even ask other team members to “grade” their colleagues in confidence to identify areas of improvement and emerging skill-building challenges. The next step is to gather all of the data in your LMS to uncover patterns and trends, as well as adjust learning paths based on your inputs.

Use gamification to collect competency development data

Badges, certifications, and leaderboards are some of the best ways to test employee skills as they track the competencies of individuals and teams. To illustrate this, employees need to achieve learning milestones in order to rise on the board and outperform their peers, creating friendly competition. More importantly, by moving up the leaderboard, you will find emerging talent and provide extra support to those who lag behind. Finally, with Gamification you get access to valuable big data in order to put together your qualification matrix and at the same time to motivate the employees to take additional training and retraining opportunities.

Create benchmarks

Job skills gaps are usually not a sudden epidemic. In fact, they’re usually the result of poor performance, training interruptions, and other issues that crop up over time. However, assessing the skills of people in the lab will not only help you quickly fill those gaps, it will also help you identify deeper issues with your eLearning strategy. For example, employees must pass five knowledge checks during the course of their certification to test what they know and how well they can apply it. It is also advisable to book your course or certification path with a pre-existing expertise exam and one at the end to evaluate how far you have come.

Insider tip: Some learning management systems have an automatic assignment feature that allows you to plan your future online training activities based on past performance. So add this to your LMS qualification and retraining selection criteria.

How does an LMS help in mapping skills?

Now comes the most important question: How can your LMS help you assess the talents of your employees and compile all the data for your competence matrix? A top LMS allows you to host different types of training content to evaluate cognitive skills through qualitative assessments. Another functionality to consider is Gamification Support, which allows you to create badges for key competencies to monitor their progress and provide instant feedback. You should also have access to robust reporting dashboards and team views so managers can track performance and make individual recommendations on how to build skills. Adobe Captivate Prime even has personal learner homepages that give employees an overview of their progress, upcoming courses, and relevant support tools based on the company’s priorities.

Download the eBook Upskilling and Reskilling Essentials: How To Address the Emerging Challenges of the Future of Work to learn how to nurture in-house talent regardless of your budget or staff size.