Abstractness of Talent in Skills Dimension

• Line function and business leaders appreciate very much that talent is the key driver of the company or business. But talent is fuzzy. There is lack of clear information on talent particularly if we focus on “skills” dimension of talent i.e. not just of age, demography, education, experience or qualification related information of employees.

• Line function and business leaders like data. Data helps them appreciate situations better, makes analysis better and helps them plan and track progress. Lack of data on skills frustrates line function as they are not able to take data-backed decisions on skills such as what skills to develop, what skills to hire and such.

• HR is comfortable with behavioural and soft skills. Line function is more concerned about the functional / technical skills. Thus there is a lack of ownership of skills of employee as a whole.

What can be done?

• We need to get data on skills of employees, as we would have data of any other resource in the company – materials or money. Skills is not same as the people related information.

• We need to have the skills information or data that is holistic i.e. includes behavioural or soft skills and functional or technical skills, that is dynamically managed (and not stale information) and that is easy to manipulate like other data.

• HR should take ownership for “skills” as a whole and not for piece of information. HR should start paying attention to information or data on skills as much they do on other information or data.

How can this be enabled?

It’s Your Skills offers powerful way for mapping skills of employees and jobs using a dynamically updated exhaustive skills library covering functional/technical and behavioural skills

Using these, HR can easily play the custodian of skills information or data of the employees in the company and effectively facilitate business decisions.