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      Why your business needs a skills audit

      by David Cameron

      Learning and development strategies

      Something’s missing, but you don't know what it is. That something is the precise skill set your business needs to meet your current and future ambitions. How are you going to find out about missing skills, and then find them? Your first step is a skills audit.

      HOW TO CONDUCT A SKILLS AUDIT - LEARNING FROM THE BEAUTIFUL GAME

      The windows have closed all over Europe. Football’s transfer windows, that is. And the clubs that emerged stronger are those that successfully identified the skills they were lacking and brought in the players who possess these skills. But once a window has closed, how can a skills gap be closed also? The club must do its best with the talent it has: if left-back is a position that needs filling, then a surplus left-sided midfielder who is a strong tackler might be brought back into defence. The player will be drilled in training on how to play that position.

       

      Footballer imagePhoto credit: photo news


      In summer 2019, Real Madrid spent over €100 million closing a skills gap by signing Eden Hazard from Chelsea. 

       

      Football isn’t only a simple game, it’s a huge business. And as with every other business, a football club has two options available to it for closing a skills gap: recruitment and training. A skills audit identifies which skills a company currently possesses and which skills it requires in order to achieve its ambitions.


      One football club’s ambition might be to avoid relegation, another to win a major trophy. Needs must be aligned realistically with budgets. A skills audit isn’t an exercise in fantasy football/business - it is a reality check geared towards meeting aspirations.

      AUDIT FOR ACCURACY


      Without a skills audit, how would you know with any real accuracy where improvement is needed? The laser is mightily more precise than the scatter-gun: a skills audit enables you to be laser-like in targeting your company’s training.

       

      But if training alone isn’t the answer - because you need these new skills NOW, or the skills needed can’t be trained in-house - then you’ll need to recruit more staff. And a skills audit helps here, too, by clarifying just what kind of talent you need.

       

      There will be skills gaps you can close with the help of curated digital learning delivered by a platform such as Skillsoft’s Percipio. You might need to complement this with something more custom-made, such as elearning courses and other digital assets created by Logicearth’s Content Development. And for pinpoint accuracy in identifying and closing skills gaps - whether in individuals or whole departments - then a spaced-practice, data-driven microlearning tool like Verify is perfect.

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      NOW THE “HOW-TO”


      So, you’re convinced of an audit’s value, now you might turn your attention to which skills audit template to use. You will find such online, but essentially they boil down to these component guidelines:

      • Make a list of all of the roles within your company
      • Detail the skills needed for each of these roles
      • Identify the skills gaps (digitally, or through employee assessment/review)
      • Compile the results of the skills gap analysis with any other information gathered (e.g. via a workforce survey)
      • Analyse the resulting data by matching the roles to the available skills

       

      A skills audit can help your business with its development planning and your employees with their own personal development. In the jargon-filled business world. there might be jazzier-sounding paths to profitability than the ‘skills audit’, but few of these will be more rewarding or straightforward to pursue.

       

      Logicearth can help you pinpoint and close skills gaps in your organisation, talk to us today:

      GET IN TOUCH


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