The employability of employees is a major concern for HR and managers. As an essential element of the Jobs & Skills Management system, it is in the interest of both the employees and the company.
How do we define the term employability? How important is it for employees and for the organization as a whole? What are the different steps to implement to develop the employability of your employees?
How should employability be defined?
Employability is a concept that appeared in England in the 19th century and was used to refer to the support provided by the public authorities to social classes in difficulty. Today, in the business world, employability is used to designate the ability of an employee to be hired by a company, to keep his or her job and to develop his or her skills following the transformation of professions. As David Dunning points out, cultivating the employability of employees also means offering them the awareness that they can do better.
Employability therefore clearly refers to the notions of adapting skills and the means made available to each employee.
What are these categories of skills ? We answer you in our page"Categories of skills ".
What is the benefit of employability for employees?
Employability enables employees to anticipate probable changes by reinforcing their skills during their careers. The employability systems also offer them the potential orientations of their jobs, the so-called "emerging" skills . In addition, each employee becomes aware of his or her level on the skills required for his or her current role through self-assessment, continuous feedback from his or her manager and key moments of the year such as the annual performance review.
The rapid evolution of know-how in the company contributes to the need for regular communication, as highlighted in our article"Continuous feedback replaces the annual review".
What are the benefits of employability schemes for the company?
Employability is obviously not only useful for employees. Employability schemes enable companies to respond to rapid changes in skill requirements. Here are some examples of the contexts in which they can occur:
- The change can come from an evolution of the company's strategy, as Sage has recently done with Neobrain, see the success story Neobrain & Sage.
- Change is also linked to uncertainty, mostly caused by external factors. Reducing uncertainty is one of the use cases of our HR ecosystem.
The employability of employees is both a corporate responsibility and an opportunity that goes beyond the legal framework of Jobs & Skills Management. Implid and Neobrain conducted a survey on their priorities in the management of skills and found that anticipation is one of the top priorities.
The 7 steps to develop employee employability
Here are the details of the seven steps to improve employee adaptation skills :
Step 1: Map the internal skills and the necessary skills.
The notion of skill is the common denominator for all your employability development actions. To build it, you can rely on the taxonomy and ontology that we explain in our article Guide"Good practices in the management of skills ".
Step 2: Establish an initial diagnosis of collective skills levels .
Thanks to the mapping of skills and the self-assessment of the employees, reinforced by an assessment of the manager, a report can be established.
Step 3: Examine the individual situations of each employee.
Objectivize evaluations through tests, 360 feedback so as to have reliable data.
Step 4: Associate training content with levels of skills.
You have a rich library of training content, but you haven't yet linked it to skills acquired? Bring together managers and business experts to tag each training content to a specific skill and a level achieved. Neobrain integrates all the content taken from training organizations, and matches it to skills of your repositories in order to make this step easier.
Go into detail on this dimension by reading your article:"All about the referentials of skills ".
Step 5: Create an individualized development plan for skills
Anchoring employability as a priority means integrating the development plan as the driving force behind each person's career path. Performance objectives are too often given priority over development plans, even though the latter are the primary factors in achieving performance. Here is an example of a development plan on the Neobrain platform.
Step 6: Roll out the training
The training courses are accessible in 2 ways:
- By automatic suggestion of the artificial intelligence. This recommendation appears directly on the employee's profile and his or her evaluation of each key skill, and his or her aptitude for developing certain skills.
- By searching for the employee, manager or HR in the training library.
A workflow system from request to acceptance to scheduling will be automatically triggered. The social dimension of the talent management platform accelerates its adoption: the employee can both evaluate the relevance of the training presented and suggest it to his network.
Upgrading to skills to reinforce employability has several objectives: it can be upskilling (development in a similar job), reskilling (to keep the individual in his or her job) or cross-skilling (mobility to a job related to the current job).
You will find the details of these objectives in the page"The objectives of the ascents in skills ".
Step 7: Measuring the evolution of employability
The review of training results consists of several metrics:
- The adherence of employees to suggested training courses, the number of requests for training.
- The skills most requested in the trainings
- The overall evolution of skills levels by business line, department, location, ....
- The training modalities that have contributed most to the employability of each individual
