A taste for Skills

In today’s fast-paced and rapidly changing business environment, it is important for companies to have a workforce that is flexible and able to learn new skills quickly. This allows them to take advantage of new opportunities and technologies as they emerge, and to pivot as needed to meet the changing demands of their customers. Companies that are able to attract and retain employees with a diverse set of skills will be better positioned to succeed in the years ahead.

Re-skill or up-skill?

There are several reasons why companies may need to focus on re-skilling or up-skilling their employees in 2023. These include:

• Rapid technological change: As technology continues to advance, certain skills may become obsolete, while new skills will be in high demand. Companies need to ensure that their employees have the necessary skills to stay competitive in their industry.

• Talent shortages: There may be shortages of qualified candidates in certain industries or for certain types of roles. By investing in the development of their existing employees, companies can fill these gaps and reduce their reliance on external hires.

• Increased customer demands: As customer expectations evolve, companies may need to train their employees to provide new or improved products and services.

• Business growth: As a company grows and expands into new markets, it may need to up-skill its employees to meet the demands of these new opportunities.

To set up a re-skilling or up-skilling program, companies can follow these steps:

1. Identify the skills that are most important for the company’s success in the future. This may involve analysing industry trends, reviewing business plans, and consulting with experts.
2. Determine which employees need to be re-skilled or up-skilled. This may include employees who are in roles that will be affected by technological change, as well as employees who are seeking career advancement.
3. Develop a plan for training and development. This should include the types of training that will be offered, who will be responsible for delivering the training, and how the training will be funded.
4. Implement the training program. This may involve offering in-house training, sending employees to external training programs, or using online learning resources.
5. Evaluate the effectiveness of the training program. This can help the company determine whether the program is meeting its goals and identify areas for improvement.

Do it with Skills 

To begin with, it’s critical to know what skills you have within your organisation already. There are several ways to track employees’ skills in a company, and one option is to use a tool like ServiceNow.

With Skills Management you can associate skills with individual users or groups and assign them to specific tasks or projects. You can also assess the skills needed for your organization, identify gaps, and implement effective plans for hiring or training of your teams. Thanks to this application, you can:

• Manage skills for agents and your employees from a central location
• Use a standard way to identify skills for your organization and keep them up to date
• Group skills into categories and define skill levels to track the expertise of your resources at a granular level
• Reduce task or project reassignments by assigning tasks to agents and projects to teams that have the right skills to work on those items
• Identify skill gaps and resolve them by implementing effective plans for coaching and training of resources
• Manage the effectiveness of your team by evaluating the skills your team has and determining the skills you need for on your projects

• As an HR manager, you can identify the types of skills your organization needs and make hiring decisions based on those needs. Manage your team’s effectiveness by understanding what type of skills your employees need to get hired or get trained to take on other roles
• As a project and portfolio manager, standardize how you categorize skills, define skill level types, and add skill levels for your team. Set up skills for your team in a central location and make them available within your team. Prevent project reassignments by assigning projects to the team members who have the right skills to work on them

On top of the Skills Management, you can use Workforce Optimization to assess agent skills, identify areas where they need improvement and provide training to enhance their skills set, track your teams performance.

With Coaching you can:

• automate the scoring, grading, and assessment of agent skills
• use coaching opportunities to create assessments
• track training assigned to agents based on their assessments
• analyze the skill gap and recommend training
• managers can assign courses to agents from third-party learning management systems (LMS), e.g.Udemy, Pluralsight, and Cornerstone OnDemand

You can use Coaching with Learning to train your agents with internal and external learning content – organize similar content into learning libraries, assign learning tasks to your agents and track completion and create learning paths that include a collection of courses on a specific topic associated with a set of skills.