Your aspirations matter – Who helps you understand which skills you should develop?
TeamFit is undergoing a skill review at the moment. We are looking at the skills we have in the company and what skills we need to deliver on our goals. We are also trying to look out six months and 18 months to see what skills we are going to need. Now that we have companies using TeamFit to manage skills and to build teams we need to make sure we can help each of our clients succeed.
Finding skill gaps is important to every company. Even if you have all the skills you need to achieve your goals today, and are applying those skills successfully, that will change. Clients will bring up new challenges, new technologies and methodologies will emerge, and new opportunities will open up that will require new skills.
How do you keep track of the skills you have, those you are using and the one you will need?
This is not an easy task, even for an individual. We asked a number of high-performing consultants what they do to stay on top of their game. Then boiled this down into a simple process.
Ask your clients which of your skills they value
Ask you colleagues which of your skills they rely on
Compare yourself with your competitors (and your peers)
What are your shared skills?
What are your unique skills?
What are their unique skills?
Look to see what skills will be needed in the future
Look into the future. Or as Wayne Gretzky said, ‘skate to where the puck is going’ (for a sobering look at the popularity of this phrase check out this Canadian Business article). We all know this is easier said than done.
What skills will you need in the future?
There are a few ways to get a feel for this.
Look at long-tail skills, your own, your peers and your companies
Look at skill searches on TeamFit (we will make this available as part of the Dashboard release later this month)
Build a team in TeamBuilder that you would like to be on and compare yourself to the candidates that show up
Let’s take a practical example. Say you believe that the Internet of Things is going to be a big opportunity and that you want to develop the skills you need to get on projects in this area. Build a trial team in Teambuilder. Ask around to see what skills people are going to require and add those as general skills or to the role you are most interested in.
Compare the skills that come up and look to see what is missing. The skills that are easy to find are table stakes. You have to have these in order to even be considered. In this space, these are Project Management, Trello and generic Internet of Things skills. The skills that are not showing up are your opportunity. These are the more specific technical skills like PTC Thingworx (a commercial platform used for integrating the Internet of Things), Arudino (an open-source electronics platform) and sensor integration (a common theme in this field). Develop expertise in these areas and you will win the work you want.
In general, the more specific the skill the more it will help you to get work. Of course, you can’t just claim to have a skill. You have to have the actual project experience to demonstrate expertise. That could be hard with something like Thingworx, a big industrial software platform. But there are many opportunities to get involved in open source projects that use Arduino. On TeamFit, you want to include both your formal work projects and your side projects.
