As a rule, we know that our people perform at their best when the role they are performing aligns with their natural strengths and capabilities. Despite this, many individuals are in their current job as a result of less relevant factors, such as how long they have been with the organisation, qualifications achieved over a decade ago, or the businesses they worked for in the past.The clearest way for businesses to understand the potential of their employees and matching them to the best role is through assessment. And, when people are in the right role, employers are rewarded with more engaged, productive and motivated individuals. Assessments can also help organisations to identify skills adjacencies which may be helpful when there are skills shortages in areas of the business, or when looking to make better use of an individual’s talents.
Assessments should be standard procedure across the board, as they increase the likelihood of placing the right person in the right role from 50% to over 80%. And yet, just 48% of employees have had an assessment of their skills. This means that organisations are potentially missing out on the opportunity for optimising roles as a result.
Using AI to predict future skills and assess, map and develop talent
To help companies understand the skills their workforce currently has, the skills they will need to help them remain competitive for the future, and how they can bridge the gap to build talent within their organisation, ManpowerGroup has designed an innovative Artificial Intelligence driven platform. Visi-Skill combines data analytics and workforce insights to help employers develop their own cloud-based skills bank.
Visi-Skill captures the specific technical skills and human strengths of the workforce, analyses current roles and generates an AI dashboard of skills changes over time, projecting the evolution of roles over a one to three year period. Every role breaks down the proportion of skills required: for example, a java developer role may require 50% java coding skills, 20% C# coding, 10% software design and 20% creativity. AI uses semantics to analyse people within the organisation, and can also analyse the CVs of prospective candidates, assessing whose skills most closely align with the current and future skills demands.
All of this gives businesses an unprecedented level of visibility into the skills they have available within their organisation.
How organisations can use assessment and upskilling to collaborate with the machines
Skills are the passport to growth and resilience for organisations and individuals alike. Here are a few ways to make sure that your organisation has the right talent for the future:1. Know The Capabilities Of Your People
Organisations need to use assessment, clean data and predictive performance to deploy talent in the most effective way, and avoid creating “skills silos”.2. Tailor Training
Companies must replace sheep-dip approaches to training with focused strategies and guidance to develop critical, in-demand skills for their workforce.3. Bet On Soft Skills
Organisations should fine-tune talent strategies to account for the fact that human skills are harder to develop than technical skills.4. Enable Humans To Augment Technology
Companies must continuously upskill their workers and create talent. And they must assess and reevaluate the skills they need, to ensure human talent complements automation.Interested in finding out more about talent strategies for the digital age? Read more of our latest insights on the future of work and skills today.
