About a year ago, SkillsDB was at a very important point in its history. At that time, we noticed we were losing clients because they wanted a feature we did not want to implement. The feature was permitting employees to define skills as they use their skills management system.
At that point, we knew the mess this could lead to if not done properly, so whenever this feature came up, we held our heads high like soldiers in a Chinese military parade, and said no!
After some time though, we noticed that Steve’s position on this began to shift. He was probably thinking what I was thinking – “If this is what they want, then it’s our obligation to give it to them.”
So like a good pharmacy, we produced the feature to ease the pain of our clients, wrote the prescription, and clearly outlined the potential side effects.
One week passed, then one month, then one year, and up till this day, we haven’t gotten a single complaint from our clients about this feature leading to an issue.
On the contrary, thanks to this feature (and others), you can literally start using your skills management system in a few hours.
And that is the first thing you didn’t know about creating a skills management system.
1. You don’t need weeks to implement your skills management system
Implementing HR systems can be an unusually complex process. Many people come to us with the mindset that getting their skills management system up and running is going to be very hard, so even before they start, they’re defeated.
Quite contrarily, modern skills management systems are designed to be “easy to use.” At SkillsDB, we live by those words, so we spent a lot of time, research, and effort to get you the features needed to make this as easy as possible.
There are two basic steps in getting a skills management system ready for your people to use:
- Define Personnel
- Define Skills
In SkillsDB, those steps are actually “import personnel” and “import skills.”
To import your personnel, you can simply export their data into a spreadsheet (possibly from your payroll management or HR system), and then import them into SkillsDB. We provide clear instructions and are always ready to guide you to make this a smooth process.
To import company skills, we provide you with a skills template in Excel format. You can simply share this with department managers and have them populate it with the skills in their department. After that, you import the template into our system and all your skills information are ready to use.
When setting up skills, you may also decide instead to use the feature we spoke about at the outset. Using this feature, you will need to do zero skills setup work. Simply import your people and allow them create the skill they want to rate themselves on. If one employee creates a skill, others would be able to see and rate themselves on that skill. So in a short time, you would have a complete skills list.
You may contact us if you want to cut out the hassle and get your system up and running before the clock strikes “Midweek.”
2. Implementing skills management can save your company much money (according to company reports)
If you were looking for a way to sell top management on your need to implement a skills management system, please put down your phone, drop those papers, tell Mr. John to keep silent for a moment, and listen – “Skills Management Can Save Your Company Much Money.”
But How?
For one thing, you can hardly fully utilize your people if you have no way of tracking their skills. So the first source of financial gain comes from better utilization of personnel, and this is far more important than it may seem at first.
Case in point:
“Speaking about a client he worked with, Andy Andrews of Salary.com said ‘they were spending too much money on contractors and external resources. They had in-house skills but they did not know where they were in the organization. It was easier for them even if more expensive to go out and hire external resources.’”
“[This Company] was able to reduce this spending by implementing skills management. With the system in place, they knew the skills that were available in the company, and the people who had those skills. They could thus utilize their people and reduce external contracts.”
To learn other financial and organizational benefits of skills management, please read “The Impact of Skills Management on Business Performance.”
3. Training and Succession planning without skills management is like shooting in the dark
A company I work with decided to expand a while back. Our CEO sought executives from various fields, even hiring a past executive of one of the biggest fast-food franchises.
In all, four people were hired. Less than a year later, not one of the executives remained. They all washed out because the company culture was new to them, and they could hardly cope.
After this happened, our CEO finally realized what she should have done all along. She started promoting from within, and our diligent operations manager quickly became a director.
Ideally, most top positions should be filled via promotion. But when it comes to the issue of succession planning, many companies still do not know what they are doing.
The first step in succession planning is identifying talent. A skills management system helps ensure you properly identify talents and groom them right from the beginning.
Since succession takes a lot of training and mentorship, it would be counterproductive to spend all that on a less than ideal candidate.
With a skills management system in place, you’d be able to identify employees who have core skills which are useful for the job, and soft skills which are needed for leadership, right from early on in an employee’s career. The system will also help management strengthen and reassess these skills over time.
Without this data, if top management only relies on recommendations from people, they’re shooting in the dark.
4. Implementing a skills management system is surprisingly pocket friendly
A decent breakfast for 2 = $25
SkillsDB Small Business Plan = $20/Month
For a system that can save many company $$ and increase talent utilization and company productivity, you might expect it would cost more right? Well it doesn’t.
How Can You Use This Information?
If you were planning to implement a skills management system for your company, you might have had some misconceptions about the difficulty, cost, and benefits of getting this done (many people do).
I hope this post has cleared up some of those.
The points made in the post are based on what is obtainable with our software, so if you would like to quicken your implementation process, please give us a call (720 457-3312), or book a live demo.
We would be happy to get you up and running if our system matches your use cases. If not, you can rest assured we would point you in the right direction.
By: Mesheal Fegor
Sales & Support
http://skillsdbpro.com