Organizational Approaches to Skills Assessment - Survey Report
Brent Ross is Customer Success Manager at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.
Ibbaka has an ongoing research program into various aspects of skill and competency management. We use this research to help our customers better understand the key choices they need to make when adopting skill and competency management as an adjunct to existing processes that help them to assess and build capabilities and then put them to work in job roles and project roles.
Ibbaka Talent has recently launched a feature that enables managers and employees to conduct joint skill assessments. These can be connected to a competency model but they do not have to be. As is our practice, we have used a survey to help us better understand more about how individuals and organizations are approaching and leveraging skill assessments. You can download our report at here:
Download the full report
This report is for front-line managers and leaders in the organization who are responsible for deriving value from Talent Management processes. I outline some of the high-level themes we explore in the report.
Although we had a relatively small sample size for this survey - just 67 participants - some interesting things emerged in the data.
Our proprietary clustering and segmentation platform found two groups of respondents, with two different approaches to skills assessment - one focussed heavily on outcomes and work product as a means to assess skills, and the other focused on collecting data from a variety of sources, such as managers, peers, asking individuals to self-assess, as well as referencing experts or third parties.
We characterize each of the groups in more detail and provide recommendations for each of the groups in the report.The use of frameworks appears to be correlated with whether or not organizations are assessing skills at all, whether it’s as part of a performance management process or happens outside that process.
One of the most notable themes in the data was a contrast between the respective roles of peers and managers in assessing skills. This depended on the purpose of the assessment.
When asked how people assess their own skills, ‘Ask My Manager’ ranked 7th in the list of options when it came to how individuals prefer to assess their skills. Yet, when asked who was responsible for skills assessment in their organizations, managers were the most frequently selected option with peers as a close second.
Peers are playing an increasingly important role in assessments and performance management. This is likely due to the fact that peers and colleagues are often closer to the day-to-day work of any one fellow employee than is the manager.
Other research we’ve conducted indicates that the people best suited to offer input to a skill assessment are those who have the skill being assessed. Organizations should take this into account when inviting peer feedback and when assessing skills.
Context is another key success factor when it comes to assessing skills.
The first level of context is application - is the skill being assessed in the context of participation of a team, or within an individual job. Peers offering a skill assessment need to know their frame of reference.
The second level of context is about how the assessment data is being used. We believe strongly that skill assessments yield the most meaningful data when performed independent of decisions related to promotions or salary increases. Divorcing skill assessments from this context puts the focus squarely on capability development and skill growth. It opens the door to continuous skills assessment, and will foster trust in the process on the part of employees.
All of this builds a richer data set from which to analyze an organization's readiness to meet new opportunities, or to continue to grow their existing business.
In our survey report, we unfold these dynamics further. We hope it provides some useful food for thought.
