Role and Skill Coverage Analysis - Using Skill Insights
Introduction
The Skill Insights tab in your role and skill coverage analysis can help you:
Identify data gaps in your analysis - data gaps are skills for which Ibbaka Talio has recognized there are not enough people within the scope of your analysis who have claimed or rejected the skills listed under the ‘Data Gaps’ drawer. This likely means the skill has never been presented to them either in a skill survey, or by Ibbaka Talio’s AI, or that they have yet to confirm whether or not they have that skill in a existing skill survey.
Data gaps can be closed by conducting a skill survey for the people who are in scope to your coverage analysis. Once you’ve created a new skill survey, you can add skills to it directly from the data gaps drawer under skill insights.Target investments: identify skills that may require more investment in order for the people included in your analysis to thrive in their roles
Find experts: identify individuals who are strong in certain skills who may be able to help support skill development
Optimizing the Configuration for Skill Insights
Using the information in the ‘Strenghts and Weaknesses’ drawers for skill insights is most useful when you have constrained your analysis by ‘locking’ people to roles they either play today, or the roles they are most likely to play in the near-term future. This is because the skill insights tab is designed to show you where you have coverage for the skills related to the roles in scope to your analysis, but because there is someone who can provide coverage for a skill does not necessarily they will be the ones doing the work (roles or jobs) that require those skills. That is, unless they are locked to that role in the analysis.
To get the most out of skill insights, you may wish to save more than one configuration of your analysis - one for the purposes of identifying a pipeline of talent for certain roles, for example, and a second configuration to understand skill coverage for the purposes of finding skills that require investments into professional investments today. Here’s how you might go about this:
For role coverage, have a saved configuration that helps you look at role coverage for whatever goals you may be trying to achieve on a given time horizon and that gives you more flexibility to look at people across different roles.
For skill coverage and more near-term planning of professional development investments, have another version that locks everyone in the analysis to one or more roles.
The Different Types of Skill Insights
Strengths - these are skills where you have a minimum number of people or more who have the skill at the target proficiencies required.
Weaknesses - a skill weakness is identified when the people selected for the analysis either don’t have the skill, or when there are not enough people who have the skill at the target proficiencies required to perform the roles where the skill is needed.
Data Gaps - these are skills where we do not have enough data to determine if it’s a strength or a weakness.
How to Get High-Value Skill Insights
There are four ways in which you can improve the quality of your skill coverage insights for any given competency model:
Ensure your competency model is complete (grouping skills for roles, as well as setting target proficiencies). Note that must-have skills are double the weight of sould-have skills for any given role when it comes to calculating skill match and overall skill coverage.
Manage the constraints specifically for skill insights, as noted above.
Set capacities - these are the number of people you need for each role in the analysis.
Close your data gaps by conducting one or more skill surveys with the right audiences for whom you wish to see skill insights.
Interpreting Skill Strengths and Gaps
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Grouping and Ordering
Regardless of whether or not a skill is considered a gap or a strength, skills will always be grouped into their level of importance first, and then ordered from strongest to weakest.
Skills appear in the highest group required by any role. For example, if a skill is must-have in one role, but should-have for another, it will appear in the must-have skill grouping. Target proficiencies for both roles will be shown.
Understanding Coverage for Individual Skills
The drawer for each skill has the skill name and an overall skill coverage score in the headers. When you open the drawer, the roles which require that skill are displayed on the left, while the people best suited to provide coverage are listed on the right.
Note that as long as you have people who actually have the skill in question, you will only see as many people listed as indicated in your capacity settings for each of the roles.
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The more roles you see that require a given skill, and/or the most people you need for any one of those roles can suggest that this is an important skill for which you need to ensure good coverage and resources to support learning and development around that skill.
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