Why Role Coverage and Skill Gap Analysis is Mission Critical
Brent Ross is Customer Success Manager at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.
Learn about Ibbaka’s role coverage and skill gap solution
Having the right people, with the required skills, in key roles is critical for business performance. Without this, organizations are likely to fail to achieve their goals and to underperform.
At the same time, people will become frustrated if their skills are not aligned to the roles they are asked to perform.
Aligning the roles and skills of the organization with the competencies and aspirations of the team is the key to performance. This alignment is measured through role coverage.
When organizations have ambitious goals or are introducing new capabilities there are likely to be skill gaps. Getting insight into these skill gaps and having a plan to cover them is at the heart of skill management.
Organizations are increasingly being forced to strike a balance between hiring from within and going outside the organization to find the talent they need to power growth.
Hiring internally supports talent mobility and can encourage employee engagement. It is usually the first recourse for organizations wanting to grow. The costs of not doing so are clear - high turnover and the risk of valuable experience leaving the organization.
Hiring internally is not always enough, sometimes new people need to be brought in. Role coverage and skill gap analysis provide insights here as well. It provides for targeted and effective hiring.
Understanding the skills needed to help your organization grow and differentiate from competitors is now mission critical.
Traditional approaches to talent management can miss potential in the workforce. By looking at skill data and how it maps to roles we can find the people and combinations of people who have the skills needed for specific roles or who are close to having the skills needed to perform.
What do we mean by role coverage and skill gap analysis?
Before we go deeper into why you should be conducting regular role coverage and skill gap analyses, let’s look at how we think about role coverage and skill gap analysis:
Role Coverage - This is the number of people you have who ‘match’ the role at some minimum threshold, based on self-assessments, peer assessments or some other evidence. This cannot be reduced to the number of people with a job title.
Skill Gap Analysis - An analysis that helps you understand which skills are most important to develop in order to meet the target capacity when looking across a group of people in your workforce.
Used together, role coverage and skill gap analysis provide a compelling way to make sure that your organization will achieve its goals.
What is a role?
The true potential of your workforce is the skills they have, their desire to use those skills, and their ability to apply them in the context of the goals your organization is striving to achieve.
One way to organize this is through roles. Roles can take several forms.
Job roles - a job is a bundle of roles
Team roles - people often play roles on teams, be these project teams or long-standing teams responsible for key strategic initiatives or cross-functional coordination
Ad-hoc roles - there are many roles not captured in jobs or teams, these are the ad-hoc roles that people play that are so important to actual operations
Community roles - these roles are not often considered in skill management but they can provide insight into people’s abilities and passions
Let’s take a look at some of the business conditions that demand a role coverage and skill gaps analysis.
The Skills to Transform Your Business Model or Strategy
A shift in your organization’s business model or strategy will almost certainly lead to the question, ‘can we reskill x, y, z part of our workforce to deliver on our new strategy.’ An example may be shifting your focus from hardware to software and data, or moving to a value-based selling model from a more traditional model.
New capabilities are rarely completely new, independent of everything your workforce knows how to do today. New capabilities are built on existing capabilities. It is important to understand which roles in your organization will require people to acquire new skills, and which can be built on skills they already have.
If you want to really understand the potential in a group of people to grow an existing capability by and step into new roles one needs to understand which skills from their current role will transfer over.
The Skills to Keep Pace with Changing Market Conditions
Changing market conditions demand that businesses reassess the people they need to support core and new capabilities. This has never been more true as new technical skills emerge to fuel AI-drive process automation, for example.
Competitive pressures are another example of changing market conditions that demand a focus on skills. New market entrants, disruptive players making the decision to enter your space, or a competitor eating away at your market share can all require a new perspective on skills. In this case, ask what skills will strengthen your differentiation and let you build up new competitive advantage.
The Skills to Launch New Initiatives
New initiatives often require behavior change. Whether you are trying to grow a more customer-centric culture, or ensure that everyone in the business is taking a more value-centric approach to their work, there people are going to need new skills to support new behaviors.
These types of initiatives are different from capability-centric initiatives because the new skills required center around core behaviors that affect every role in the business, not just a handful of functions or teams.
Measuring skill gaps relative to behaviors, as well as roles, can be a valuable addition to your overall understanding of how prepared your business is to undertake these larger shifts that will enable business growth, and provide opportunities for individuals to grow with a clear target for the skills they need to develop.
To learn more about our software and services designed to help you measure role coverage and skill gaps, click the link below.
More posts on Role Coverage and Skill Gap Analysis
How should your organization measure role coverage and skill gaps?
Why Role Coverage and Skill Gap Analysis is Mission Critical (this post)
How is your organization collecting and using data about skill gaps?
How to Understand Skill Coverage for Key Roles in Your Organization - Ibbaka Demo
