Are employees sufficiently aware of the accelerating pace of business transformation? Do the Jobs & Skills Management systems contribute effectively to the governance of skills ?
According to the Observatoire des Trajectoires Professionnelles, there is still a gap between the perception of our ability to cope with these changes and the extent of the skills upgrades required of our employees.
89% of executives are convinced of the changes underway and are looking for support. As the backbone of HR development, skills are driven by a governance team.
The Advantages of skills governance
What do we call “skills governance? “
Skills governance, or competency oversight aims for efficiency, clarity, and responsibility in handling a company's knowledge and expertise. It involves clear decision-making, assigning responsibilities, and regular review and updating.
What are good skills governance practices?
Create relevant repositories
Co-construction workshops with operational managers are now popular with consulting firms and companies. This method is likely to bring out the essential elements and anchor the importance of the exercise at the managerial level. The democratization of AI is a factor in the detection of skills which we detail in our article.
Skill Selection: Striking a Balance Between Comprehensiveness and Efficiency
Our experience shows that the “inflation of skills ” is the most important danger to the coherence of the project. Moreover, using a methodology like the one we share with several consulting firms proves to be one of the key factors of success. A mapping of skills should ideally contain between 8 and 15 skills to be understandable and actionable.
Regularly Refresh Existing Skills
Two typologies need to be identified: the skills obsolete and the skills emerging. The obsolescence of skills is a perfectly normal phenomenon that can be explained in part by the fact that skills is being renewed more rapidly than before. According to a Deloitte study, their lifespan is now 5 years, 47% of positions will be obsolete within 3 years… Hard skills are more subject to this evolution than behavioral skills. Emerging skills are the result of the company’s strategic choices. They can be detected by Natural Language Processing techniques that aim to collect external data on job offers and select, by occurrence, those that are developing in a given sector.
Activate professional skills in the right places at the right times
Two parallel movements contribute to a new mobilization of individual faculties. On the one hand, we no longer recruit job by job. The division of a job into skills makes it possible to rationalize the allocation of resources according to the needs of the projects. On the other hand, an employee's asset base allows him or her to apply internally for activities other than his or her main function.
The Skills Steering Comittee role
What are the challenges of skills oversight?
The current difficulties in this management practice of skills stem from the stumbling blocks in the development of the mapping of internal assets. The management of jobs and career paths is based on this ordered visualization. However, the process is often lengthy and, even today, essentially supported by Excel tools that are not adapted to the issue at hand. Moreover, the members of the project team can also improve their leadership of the system once it has been deployed.
Here are the main obstacles encountered by HR teams:
- “Our businesses are changing so fast! Between the time we start our process and its conclusion, our mapping is already obsolete.”
- “Each business structures its repository in its own corner without a common methodology! It is impossible to create a common language for the entire company.”
- “Our information system can’t evolve any further, so we’d love to have something better without undoing the existing.”
- “The repositories are never used by the trades! They don’t see the value and make their decisions without regard to them.”
- “It’s such a heavy workload!”
These obstacles can be overcome by bringing together a flexible solution, a proven mapping methodology and, finally, an internal team responsible for bringing your process to life.
How do we build this skills governance team?
Data governance consists of 3 roles:
- The Business Expert:
He/she describes the main tasks attached to the jobs he/she leads, in order to formulate activities (set of tasks) and the resulting qualifications.
- The Business Sponsor:
He/she validates the strategic assets contained within the family of professions that concerns him/her. He/she participates in the prospective vision of the organization’s skills .
- The Competency Owner:
He/she is the guarantor of the semantic integrity of skills. That is to say, he/she ensures good practices in the formulation of these qualifications and their meaning for the population. He/she conducts interviews and reviews with the business experts and the local HR or HRBP.
The quality of collaboration between these 3 roles strongly influences the dynamism of your skills repository. We recommend establishing a frequency for updating and enriching qualifications. Ideally, these exchanges should take place before and after Career Committees and, if possible, in the middle of the year.
The development of skills catalogs is a key element of HR processes. Neobrain responds to this quest for efficiency of HR teams with an average time saving of 40%: make the diagnosis of your tool for free.
