Conducting a skills analysis

- I once managed a team that had generic role descriptions that didn't reflect their daily work. The team shared their frustration around not understanding their job expectations and felt growth opportunities were limited. They were missing a chance to develop critical skills to prepare them for future mobility. Does this sound familiar to you? The key to understanding the skills required for the roles on your team is to conduct a skills analysis, a practice for identifying what skills are needed to be successful in a role. I don't want you or your team to end up in the same situation as mine, so let's explore the steps to a skills analysis. First, understand what's expected of a role in your organization based on the employee level you have or will hire. For any position, there's likely a variety of internal job documentation like job descriptions that outline responsibilities and role requirements, or a role guide that focuses on the role expectations and objectives. These are usually written by HR professionals in collaboration with leaders or managers who understand a job. These can sometimes stem from a job analysis conducted by IO psychologists to identify what's needed for the role. If your documents are too generic connect with people who know the role best like your HR business partner or other hiring managers to create custom job descriptions that fit your team needs. Or if your company doesn't have these, check out sites like O Net that provide information around common roles. Use these documents to create a clear understanding of what you want the role to do and what good employee performance looks like. Next, use the role expectations to identify the top three to five critical skills for the role. Look at annual goals at your team and company level. Is there a goal that you need each person to lean into? What level of mastery is required for the role level? For example, say you're running a sales team who manages large global accounts for your company so you'll need to hire a sales professionals who have a strong executive communication, strategic thinking and negotiation skills. Finally, examine proficiency levels required for those skills. This will differ based on role level and team needs so determine those differences early on. For example, if someone's a project coordinator you might expect them to complete project execution with more oversight on their work, but not require them to manage multiple projects at once. But for a more senior project manager, they might be expected to manage multiple complex initiatives. With little oversight. A skills analysis can reveal many insights and allow you to apply those learnings to hiring, performance management and development practices. In the next video we'll discuss how to use these skills to prepare for hiring. After creating more custom role guides for my team I immediately notice a difference in my own expectations and my team members' engagement by understanding what skills were required for their role and future roles. I promise this investment in your team is worth it.