What is Skills Intelligence

Making data-driven talent decisions by relying on skills can benefit your organization because skills are becoming a new currency. Today, one of the best ways to do so is with a skills intelligence cloud.

A skills intelligence cloud is a comprehensive platform to help your organization build a data-driven and skills-first ecosystem, enhancing your talent acquisition, development, and management activities.

Considering all these aspects, this blog will walk you through what skills intelligence is, its benefits, and its different use cases. So, why don’t we dive right into the details?

What is Skills Intelligence?

Skills intelligence is an HR technology that can help your organization make better hiring decisions and improve talent development and management initiatives. It does so by building detailed skills taxonomies and ontologies after analyzing different job profiles within your organization. While doing so, it would turn every job role into specific skill sets with precise proficiency levels.

By incorporating skills intelligence within your HR architecture, you can make intelligent talent decisions and work towards building future-ready skill-fit teams.  

Before we move any further, let’s look at the two critical elements that can help provide data-driven and unbiased information from a skills intelligence platform. They are:  

• Skills Inventory: It refers to an up-to-date repository of skills, educational qualifications, and work experiences of your organization’s current workforce. It can also include an expansive list of details with different certifications, licenses, relevant information on training programs attended, and the skilled hobbies of your employees. Check out these blogs to learn more about skills inventory and the benefits of creating a Skills Inventory in your company.
• Skills Taxonomy: Skills taxonomy is one of the first layers within a skills intelligence platform that incorporates taxonomies collected from open libraries, skills management vendors, existing organizational skills data, and other sources like LMS and ATS. In short, it is a straightforward and easy-to-visualize comprehensive infrastructure of skills that can help your business optimize its talent decisions and attain the desired results with the available human capital. You can discover more about skills taxonomies from this blog.

These components can facilitate up-to-date skills data to help you make data-driven decisions for talent acquisition, development, and management activities.

To cut a long story short, with skills intelligence, your organization can create a pathway for connecting all the pieces of your skills puzzle and allow you to unlock the true potential of your workforce. Thus, with a skills intelligence platform, you can do the following efficiently and connect your organization's skills puzzle:

• Initiate pre-joining and fresher training programs
• Build a skills-first job architecture
• Build skills inventory with critical skills, skills prioritization, and skills management
• Analyze the project or client readiness of your employees
• Conduct skills gap analysis
• Help with job profile analysis
• Organize streamlined upskilling and reskilling initiatives
• Analyze skills progression to measure the ROI of L&D activities
• Perform skills benchmarking
• Facilitate cross-skilling and internal mobility
• Gain clarity on learning adoption and training effectiveness
• Manage performance appraisals seamlessly

Why Skills Intelligence stands out from other HR technologies?

There are several novel technology trends within the HR tech architecture, ranging from AI-driven recruiting to remote LMS. But, among them all, skills intelligence stands out as it can offer your organization a 360-degree overview of your employee's skills, performance, career paths, and more. It can also assist you in making data-driven decisions by validating your employees' skills accurately and unbiasedly.  

Integrating skills intelligence into your HR tech architecture can be a one-stop for all your HR directors/managers, L&D managers, and CHROs/CTOs. With this, they can conduct workforce planning and performance appraisals, screen and recruit new candidates, build employee engagement, and initiate learning and development activities.

Benefits of integrating Skills Intelligence for your business and employees

A skills intelligence platform can democratize learning, enhance your organization's recruitment process, and assist in managing talent efficiently. At an organizational level, the skills intelligence cloud can help attain strategic business growth. But, when we consider the real humans of the company, including CxOs, team leaders, and employees, skills intelligence can aid in gaining the following strategic outcomes:

• A skills intelligence platform can benchmark employees' skills proficiencies, which can help identify skills gaps and create self-directed career trajectories.  
• Team leaders and managers can obtain a high-level overview of their teams' skill mix and proficiency levels, aiding them in role optimization and delivery plan formations. They can also perform performance appraisals with the help of skills intelligence.
• For HR business partners, a skills intelligence platform can facilitate qualitative skills insights suitable for enhancing career profiles and planning compensations, benefits, and rewards for your employees. This would assist them in creating career advancement strategies for their employees.  
• For CxOs and executives, a skills intelligence platform would provide an executive dashboard for leaders to catch the organization's pulse. This would foster a continuous learning culture within your company.  

Furthermore, a skills intelligence platform can assist with workforce management, whereby you can accurately match talent demand and supply. It also supports sales and business development, where your organization can create a differentiated market positioning and stand apart from your competitors.  

In short, skills intelligence can be a core for talent transformation in your company. You can explore more about this and the critical benefits of skills intelligence in depth from here.

What are the different use cases of Skills Intelligence?

Skills intelligence comes with various use cases that can help talent leaders like you make intelligent talent decisions. They include:  

• Screening and recruiting new candidates: Talent acquisition professionals face challenges like increasing candidate dropout rates, creating proper job descriptions, etc. But, when your organization uses a skills intelligence platform, you can recruit unicorn talents and even form a diverse talent pool, benefiting your organization in the future.  
• Perform skills matching: Matching your employees (for internal mobility) or candidates (while hiring) with the proper job role is an integral HR function. You can efficiently perform this function by relying on a skills intelligence platform.  
• Benchmark your employees: By benchmarking your employees, you can understand if they have the required skills, and aligning with your company and industry standards. Based on this, you can initiate employee learning and development activities. By the way, you can learn more about benchmarking from here.  
• Create skills matrix: Offering a grid-like overview of your employees’ skills, a skills matrix can help you understand the skills proficiency of your employees in detail.  
• Conduct skills gap analysis: When there is a skills gap, it will pave the way for workplace inefficiency, reduction in productivity, etc. You can now identify these skills gaps in your employees and obtain unbiased information from a skills intelligence platform.  
• Obtain accurate skills insights: A skills intelligence platform can facilitate you with skills insights based on employees’ performance, true potential, areas of improvement, and so forth. You could plan succession, upskilling, reskilling, or cross-skilling initiatives and internal mobility based on these details.  

These are some of the top use cases of skills intelligence. You can learn about each of them in detail from this blog.

Final thoughts

Thus, in a nutshell, skills intelligence is an HR technology leveraging artificial intelligence that can benefit your organization, your HR professionals, and employees on different levels. So, integrating this skills intelligence software can be a game-changer for your HR functionalities.