Key questions for skill management in 2022
Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.
How we work, who we work with, why we work together are all likely to change in 2022.
Hopefully this will be the year that the Covid Pandemic is downgraded to be merely endemic, something we need to live with. But the changes it has brought are getting coded into how we work. One of the questions in our Critical Skills for 2022 survey is “What skills are needed for virtual and hybrid work?” The top answer may surprise you. Take the survey and we will share the results in the third week of January.
Please take our survey Critical Skills for 2022
Most of us have set or are finalizing our goals and objectives for 2022. The next step will be to determine if we have the skills needed to achieve these goals and objectives, and if we do not, how we are going to close the gap.
The skill management triangle
Beyond this, some people, teams and organizations will be looking at more meta goals, like how do we become more resilient, or how do we become more adaptive. (See our work on the resilience-adaptation-efficiency cycle). These higher level capabilities also require skills, and more importantly, flexible ways of combining skills.
Skill management is how we can connect skills to people, skills to goals and people to goals. Ibbaka sees Jobs as bundles of Roles, so skill management is also about how people are organized into roles (these can be Job Roles, Project Roles, Ad-Hoc Roles and even Community Roles).
As the year begins, people engaged in skill management should be checking to see if their organization has the skills needed to deliver on their 2022 goals.
Key questions on skill management and how to answer them
What skills do we need to achieve our goals?
What people have these skills?
How should these skills be organized into roles?
How good is our skill coverage (are there skill gaps)?
How will we cover gaps?
What are the risks if we fail to cover the gaps?
How can you answer these questions?
Start by looking at what skills have been associated with success at your organization in the past. Who are the most successful people? How do they define their roles? What skills do they have? This is important baseline data that you need to develop and execute on a skills strategy.
Once you have a good understanding of the skills in your organization and how they map to success, then you can take on the three way mapping between goals, skills and people. Ask
What skills do we need to achieve this goal?
What skills do people have?
How does this person contribute to achieving the goal?
This approach works best with a small organization or for a small number of critical people. To scale this, you will need to layer in roles.
Roles are a more powerful way to do this than jobs as they are more granular. Each person in an organization tends to play multiple roles and it is roles that map to goals much more than it is jobs. A role focus also promotes internal mobility (the ability for people to move into new jobs and even new business functions within their current organization), which is something many companies are working toward.
Adding roles requires three steps:
Map roles to goals
Map skills to roles
Map people to
The roles they currently play
The roles they could play (based on their skills)
Once you have connected goals, roles (with their skills) and people you can do an assessment. There are many ways to do this and how you approach it will depend on the corporate culture you want to support and the amount of people’s time you are willing to commit. Assessments can be self assessments, peer assessments, manager assessment, or based something more detailed and comprehensive.
The assessments combined with the roles will make skill coverage (and skill gaps) visible. Once you have this insight you can look at how to close any gaps. You might do this through training, new hires, creative ways of combining and sharing roles, or even though outsourcing, the gig economy or acquisitions.
Whatever approach you take having people with the right skills in critical roles is how you will achieve your 2022 goals.