Ensuring the right talent is in the right place is key to driving performance and growth within any organisation 🚀
With Skill Assessment, employees gain opportunities to develop and thrive, while managers play a crucial role in verifying and approving skills, ensuring a fair and accurate assessment. Skill levels, whether evaluated on a scale or requiring periodic recertification, help organisations track progress, competency, and readiness for various tasks.
Skill Assessment is a powerful tool to use to ensure to include your managers perspective from the workplace has an influence on the current skill level.
What is Skill Assessment and Manager Verification?
Skill assessment and Manager verification gives the opportunity to verify the skills that have been assigned to the employee and edit, update, and add skill levels. This means that a manager can assess and evaluate the employees' skills based on how they view their capabilities in real life and not only based off skills they have received by completing training.
Example of a use case: Employees self-assess their skills and send them to the manager for review. The manager evaluates the skills and verifies their skills by adjusting or verifying them the platform.
What skills are possible to have?
Valid/Invalid is an appropriate format for skills that employers have for a certain period before they need to redo the training. F.eg. Safety training or GDPR.
A 1-5 level is appropriate for those skills where they can continuously improve and is part of a bigger development plan.
A skill level between 1 and 5 can also show what tasks an employee is able to handle. For example; if an employee has a level 3 skill, it doesn't necessarily mean they need to improve. Instead, it could means they are capable and proficient at completing tasks that require that skill at a level 3.
Want to learn more about skills? Read our article here.
How do you get started with Skill Assessment?
An important first step is to align internally on a Skill Framework that is used with Skill Assessment. Should the managers have specific guidelines for assessing skills?
Do you need help rolling out a framework for Skill assessment in your Organization? We have a learning path called 'Empowering Skills and Competencies' for that. If you are interested in seeing it, don't hesitate to reach out to our support through [email protected]
Before Creating Skills
Define Clear Skill Names: Carefully craft skill names that accurately reflect the specific abilities or competencies you want to develop. Avoid using overly broad or generic terms that could lead to confusion. Instead, opt for clear, concise, and specific names that clearly convey the skill's essence.
Establish Skill Categories: Organize skills into meaningful categories to group related skills together. This structured approach makes it easier for users to navigate the skill catalog, quickly locate the skills relevant to their roles or interests, and discover related skill sets. Consider creating categories based on job roles, departments, or industry-specific skills.
Adopt Consistent Skill Ratings: Determine a rating system that aligns with your organization's skill development framework. We recommend adopting a five-star rating system with clear definitions for each rating level to ensure consistency and promote transparency in skill attainment assessments. Use descriptions such as:
Novice: Minimal experience or knowledge in the skill.
Beginner: Basic understanding and ability to perform tasks related to the skill with minimal guidance.
Intermediate: Solid understanding and ability to perform tasks with some level of independence and proficiency.
Advanced: In-depth understanding and strong ability to perform tasks with a high degree of independence and skill.
Expert: Mastery of the skill, with ability to train others and innovate within the field.
Establish Skill Evaluation Guidelines: Develop clear and comprehensive guidelines for evaluating the level of skill mastery associated with each learning content. These guidelines should consider factors such as the depth of knowledge, practical application, and ability to apply skills in real-world scenarios. Ensure that evaluation criteria are consistent and aligned with the skill rating system.
Consider Skill Prerequisites: For skills that build upon others, establish prerequisite relationships to ensure that users have acquired the necessary foundational knowledge before progressing to more advanced skills. This prevents users from attempting skills without the prerequisite skills and prevents them from feeling overwhelmed.
After mapping out which skills are relevant to have, the next step is to understand how to complete the skill assessment. For this, we have created a step-by-step guide.
Assessment & Verification
Manager verification relies on the manager evaluating the skills that the employees have assessed themselves. To make this process as smooth as possible, we recommend enabling 'My Team' so that the managers have a good overview of the employees in their team.
With My Team enabled, the managers can easily review and assess their skills with the following steps;
Step 1 - Find the Employee in the My Team Overview
Step 2 - Navigate to skills
Step 3 - Assessing the skill
Inside the skill overview, you can find which skills the employee has been assigned. If you choose to click on an existing skill, you can change their skill level.
All done! When the manager has fulfilled these steps, they have verified the employees skills.
NB: We have this information targeted to Managers specifically in the 'Empowering Skills and Competencies' learning path. By assigning that training to your managers you can get them involved in why you are pursuing Skill Assessment and introduced them to their role as verifiers. As mentioned above, reach out to our support if you would like to review this training.