“Our project head is asking for a combination of skills for their project. I can’t find the right person I’m looking for. I am not able to match this job profile with the many CVs I received. None of them has all the skills we are looking for. But now I am forced to take the least bad…
HR Manager, Auto Parts Manufacturer

This a challenge, we see this every day at the HR desk, Yes, it is an accepted fact and but it is just one side of a coin. On the one hand, the candidates complain about how difficult it was to have all the skills required by the recruiters. On the other side, companies themselves who complained that they had not found the right suitable candidates and not able to find the right candidate. High-skills hiring such as information technology, automobile, engineering and medical are specialized in job profile, so the number of people who can respond naturally is limited. This challenge will adversely impact the speed for business transformations and even sustenance. Skills ontology based digital HR can speed up the change management due to business transformations.

Goals of business transformations

Any business transformation models are now technology-enabled solutions to easy the business for bottom-line performance and business sustenance. Technological innovation and adoption in the industry go far beyond the creation of new professions and skills. HR functions are finding different solutions to fill the gap between the Demand and Supply. They often fails, it is a truism. Organizations modify and transform the businesses, service deliveries and their support systems with uniqueness and distinctive processes. Unfortunately, to adopt these changes, they often lack the support of trained employees with related skills. Time to market, customer experience and business sustainability have become critical business goals. To achieve these goals, investments on digital transformation and digital HR are influencing the evolution of skills required at all levels and in all functional areas of an organization

Impacts on employees and skills

The systematic development and application of digital tools have a substantial impact on employees. Almost all task for a medium and high-level job has a digital component. Digital knowledge is now part of the fundamental skills. Each employee is regularly called upon to acquire new technological tools. Digital expertise now has become the necessary skills in the professional world. Employees, HR leaders and companies are, therefore obliged to periodically acquire or upskill to secure employability, continuity as well as to achieve performance.

Job matching challenges for business transformation

The current job matching relies on each recruiter’s tacit knowledge, and recruiters can assign workers only from the limited number of candidates that they can handle. The available job matching system that can reflect the recruiter’s available knowledge and help to search for diverse techie workers for each work profile. The searching efficiency is limited and not useful due to the matching diversity and combination of skills, by retrieving their available knowledge during the search process. The available evidence suggests that, qualifications and knowledge gaps, as well as indicators of underutilized technical skills, which implies the collective waste of talents and resources, which can have significant adverse business impacts. (National Research Institute for Labour and Social Protection ) (REF) . Implementation of Digitization on various processes, including digital HR and functions is to provide better customer experience, employee experience and business continuity. It’s successes depends on the organizational culture, employee participation, skills and organisational competence. . Both the culture and employee participation is part of continuous change management programs. Organizations are adopting such programs such as lean, technology-enabled transformations such as Big Data, RPA, AI, and Deep Learning based business processes. This change management program required a mix of combination of digital skills between applied hard skills, soft skills, and leader management skills. This is analyzed by the ability to use tools and software for management in both operational and decision-making processes. ICT based technical skills used for very specialized on solutions, platforms and programming languages and basic skill for the daily use of essential business applications. The mix between advanced and basic skills differs significantly more between core, support, and back office processes.

New Skills and Naming Standards

The world of digital skills has become specialized and massive, so much so that it is often difficult to grasp its characteristics and specificities for HR executives. Business transformation are often resulted with new skills requirements. Any change in technology or a growth for an organisations results news skills. At least in such a way as to be able to plan and program-specific training proposals for the development of the project related skills required for a project. The fact is HR professionals are not able to understand the unique abilities, new skills requirements, changing skills, and its combination of requirements of their organization to develop more effective strategies for bridging skills shortages, gaps and plan training programs. Naming standards and its application in HR process for new skills in a big gap. This may entail having in-depth knowledge of many jobs’ technical specifications related to new skills. (SHRM.ORG Ref)

Global standards for naming skills & competencies.

The spread between the skills required by the organization and those present in the CV is always different. The titles they are used are different from the industry language. The fact is that there are no standards or international naming for various skills. Many times, to be distinct in the market, each institute/organizations will have unique skills certifications and training programs. Unfortunately, this is a widespread practice. Some skills that are difficult to find for a recruiter will be actually available in a different name, perhaps it is the overall search profile, and cross-matching process is incorrect. The skills aggregation by digital literacy for each country differs from country to country, region to region and its combinations are not helping the situation. UNESCO / ILO kind of organizations are doing a framework, which is the fist step that enables Skills ontology based digital HR to solve challenges by building structures for digital skills and bring it in one umbrella. ( REF)

Lack of practical skills libraries

Similar to software coding standards, a defined classification of skills is not available globally. There is no measurement process to assess skill proficiency. Majority of the current systems follow subjective and text-based notes. Lack of tracking and adding of new skills into the repository is another challenge. Skills naming, levels of sub-skills, its Skills proficiency and the skills inventory are hardly maintained by the organizations.

Skills ontology based digital HR – Addressing challenges

HR leaders of fast-growing organizations were recognizing these challenges, its importance and started managing employee skills for business performance. The good news is that the HR leaders of various European Union government bodies have understood these challenges due to extensive migration and labour mobility within the Union member countries. They have initiated separate departments to build skills ontology-based systems and application portal such as ESCO (REF) to be used by the ministries. Ontology-based Skills management system, capabilities can now be managed effectively as a vital skills inventory,

Thanks to the development of this new data science-based tools for delivering the missing link in skills management, which is practical, measurable and with objective metrics. Rather than a subjective based, biased systems, an objective-based with reliable parameters enables organsations to recruit, manage and retain employee skills for measurable success. A definitive data science based solution for the managing skills helps organsations to move on to not only for business sustenance, but also the next orbit of growth. Find out how Generic HR / HCM applications can integrate such best-of-breed ontology based skills solutions for their superior performance. For more information or a quick walk-through of skills ontology based digital HR, please connect with us today!