How to Understand Which Skills Your People Need to Develop

8 Sep 2023

Due to the unique individuality of an organisation’s employees, it can be really challenging for HR professionals to accurately evaluate skill sets in their organisation.

There is no “one size fits all”.

At the end of the day, every employee will be at a different point in their development journey and will therefore require varying levels of support. In order to successfully provide for your team, you need a solution.

How to Understand Employee Skill Sets For Learning & Development

To drive continuous improvement and grow your business, it’s crucial that you can accurately assess where an individual is now and where they need to be in the future.

You can do this by first looking at the bigger picture and considering employee skill sets at an organisational level. What are your priorities? Which skills do you need?

Step 1: Define Competence in Your Organisation

Every organisation is going to have a very different idea of what success looks like.

Do you want your employees to be autonomous, operating completely by themselves? Do you want there to be more interaction, where your employees encourage each other’s success?

Either way, you need to take the time to define competence according to your specific development goals. This will give you a clear idea of which soft and hard skill sets you want to develop and who would be best to invest in.

Step 2: Place Your Employees on the Scale

Once you have a good understanding of what competence looks like in your organisation, it’ll be really easy to start placing your employees on the development scale.

Do they have zero relevant knowledge and need all the training they can get?
Are they currently undergoing training?
Can they fulfil their role reasonably with a little bit of additional support?
Are they proficient all by themselves?
Have they developed the knowledge required to teach others?

Any great business will want all of its employees to be on the higher end of their learning journey. It will be your task to start accomplishing this by mapping employee skill sets and designing a plan to nurture personal and professional growth.

Step 3: Identify Employee Strengths and Weaknesses

By identifying where your employees are on the development scale, you can start putting the right training processes in place to advance an individual’s knowledge. If one of your main goals, for example, is to get everyone proficient with using Salesforce, you can introduce a mandatory online study course. This will teach your staff members about the platform and allow them to be more confident in using it, having a positive effect on your organisation’s day-to-day productivity.

Step 4: Define, Develop and Leverage Skills through Learning & Development

Once you’ve considered the short-term, you also need to support employee development on an ongoing basis. There’s always more to learn.

Even when your employees are seemingly comfortable with a specific skill, that doesn’t mean they’ve reached the end of their development. In fact, going from “consciously skilled” to “unconsciously skilled” on the following scale can be a really big leap.

It’s not always easy.

It takes time, effort, and - most importantly - practice for an employee to gain dependability and perform a skill like it’s second nature. This is the goal you want to push toward for your business, no matter who the employee is or the skill sets you’d like them to develop.

Step 5: Create a Cycle of Continuous Improvement

People development is a long road with no end in sight. There’s constantly going to be more training and support that you can offer your employees, requiring ongoing effort on your part.

It’ll be worth it.

Even when your entire team is able to use Salesforce, you should encourage skill proficiency one step further. They should not only be able to navigate the application with ease, but also be able to teach others to use it.

This will create a cycle of continuous improvement across your organisation, where you are required to offer less one-on-one support. Your team will be able to rely on each other for advice and can push each other to a whole new level.

Step 6: Reward Development Progress

As your employees advance their skill sets, engage with their training, and perform optimally in their roles, they’ll become better suited to move up the ladder. You should reward hard-working individuals with career advancement opportunities that nurture their ongoing progress. This will benefit your organisation as a whole, retaining quality talent and ensuring business success in the long term.

About Four Recruitment

At Four Recruitment, we don't just match CVs with job descriptions; we're here to build genuine, authentic connections between talented candidates and top employers.

We go the extra mile to uncover the best candidates, even if they seem elusive or hard to find. If we can't find them, they don't exist. That's how dedicated we are to sourcing the best talent for our clients.

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