Four Benefits of Building a Skills Inventory in the Workplace

Are you in charge of a team or assembling a new one? You may want to consider looking at your staffing from a skills inventory perspective. A skills inventory is a collection of skills, education, and experiences of an organization’s employees. Employees are an organization’s greatest assets. You can have a great product or service, but if you don’t have the right team of staff that compliments each other, your business may not achieve what it is capable of. By creating an inventory, an employer can ensure that they have a well-rounded team that can help make the business succeed.

Benefits of creating a skills inventory

1. Skills optimization

Building a skills inventory of your staff can showcase each team members’ area of expertise. Skills inventories allow easy access to locate the best resource for a job, whether it’s the Excel wiz or master public speaker you are looking for. Having capable employees deliver projects and tasks that match their area of expertise, balances the workload and optimizes the service and quality of results.

2. Career and succession planning

A skills inventory can be utilized for career planning by an individual or team to monitor their current skill portfolio and reveal areas for growth and development. This could also prove useful when it comes to recruitment and promotion. It can also provide knowledge sharing/transfer to assist with succession planning as employees move onto different employment opportunities.

3. Continuous learning

A skills inventory can drive your organization’s training - consider training your employees for the skills your business needs by accessing a skills training program. You could also include cross training employees into different roles or duties and responsibilities. Cross training is an effective way of strengthening your organization as your team can scale efforts to demand in various areas. Using the inventory, as well as staff interest, cross training can benefit your staff by learning from their colleagues and developing their own skillset.

4. Digital transformation

Digital transformation has become an essential part of most businesses and organizations in the last year. Assessing and evaluating the current level of technical skills in a team and determining the necessary steps to improve can be crucial in determining recruitment, training, and/or funding. Check out WorkBC’s resources for communities.

How to create a skills inventory

Creating an inventory can be achieved quite simply by creating a spreadsheet, OneNote, a software application, any document or format that allows you to keep “inventory” of your employees’ skillsets. Having this information documented into one format will allow you to better capture the skills of your employees. It can also provide a visual gap, which can assist in training needs or new hire recruitment strategies.

Many people often underestimate the range of skills they possess but brainstorming the different experiences you’ve had by breaking it down into multiple categories can help you discover your attributes. Some categories to consider include:

• Technical Skills: This is a very broad category and may include anything from Microsoft Excel to coding. Knowledge in areas like computer programming, content management, web development, and image and video editing is advantageous. Technical skills don’t always have to be computer-related either, it could be numbers, accounting, financial modeling and more!
• Interpersonal Skills: Knowing how to communicate with people and forming strong relationships is crucial with whatever job you have. Interpersonal skills may include conflict management, public speaking and presentation abilities, delegation and teamwork.
• Intrapersonal Skills: Intrapersonal skills refer to internal dialogue and the emotional relationship one has with their self. Intrapersonal skills can include productivity, resilience, resourcefulness, attentiveness, flexibility, motivation and independence. It takes a lot of self-awareness and self-evaluation to pin down your intrapersonal skills to highlight, which are also intrapersonal skills in themselves!

Creating a skills inventory is only the beginning - once the system starts rolling, it should be maintained to preserve its relevance.

There are many ways a business can approach assembling a skills inventory – you can refer to these examples for inspiration. An organization should always heighten its readiness and be prepared for any opportunities. Identifying the skills and emphasizing the needed training can help prepare for any changes. Check out the Skills for the Future Workforce for a comprehensive view of skills, competencies and characteristics.