Professional Skills Management: what it is and how to use it in managing critical skills

Professional Skills management reveals its full potential when it becomes key to planning decisions, training and development, and compensation elements.

In this light, it can be an essential competitive advantage in an era of remarkable evolution of the critical skills needed within organizations.

What is professional competency management

Professional competency management is a methodology for collecting and analyzing data on the company’s technical and professional competencies to promote the effective planning of certain key actions related to people management, particularly onboarding, training, scheduling, and professional development. It also guides business decisions, optimizing company results and individual satisfaction.

Optimizing business through Professional Skills management: a case study of success

We had the opportunity to assist in the development of a Professional Skills Analytics process for an automotive company. The organization required highly crafted skills, with personnel highly specialized in individual materials and vehicle parts.

The first need was technical skills mapping: how to assess actual skills? So, the first step was to rationalize these skills, totalling about 250, which we aggregated according to logical groups.

Next, we identified the skills required for each role (for example, the person in charge of seat-making had to have skills related to knowledge of materials, seat structure, and stitching…).

At that point, it was possible to structure a system for assessing and managing professional skills, which is critical at the corporate level on several fronts.

Managing Professional Skills: planning the transmission of skills in the company

In this process, distinguishing between common skills and “rare” skills, that is, skills possessed by only a few people within the workforce, proved crucial. “Rare” skills become ‘critical’ when they are scarcely available even in the market and take a long time to train.

This rationalization has made important arguments about knowledge management or critical knowledge management within the organization possible.

In fact, it was possible to initiate strategic planning reasoning to avoid the risk that critical skills would also be lost, for example, through the retirement or exit of some individuals from the organization.

Thanks to the management of Professional Skills, it is also possible to identify skills for which to organize training initiatives, ensuring that even sporadic absences do not affect productivity.

Professional Skills management: other benefits

Increased awareness about the professional-technical skills present in the company also offers additional benefits. In the case of the company described in this article, it has been useful in identifying a methodology for mapping according to objective criteria factors such as polyvalence and multifunctionality, which are also recognized by supplementary agreements at the economic level.

Other benefits of this approach are:

• internal mobility, internal growth and succession plans: facilitating the various processes of mobility and internal growth through preliminary verification of the skills possessed by people with respect to the profiles to be filled, so as to verify the coverage of the expected role or to direct targeted training actions
• strategic planning of critical skills, planning exits and the time needed to train them again, integrating workforce planning and skill planning
• revision of work organization, simplifying some operations or some processes that require critical skills, and reducing the need for them.

The professional skills management model retains its fundamental structure but declines in different ways in more operational/productive contexts than in “knowledge worker” contexts (typically the so-called “white collar” world).

Professional skills management will see major evolutions in the coming period, partly due to the contribution of artificial intelligence-based systems, and will increasingly become a key factor in the planning and management of people in the company.

At HR Intelligence, we support companies in creating Professional Competency Management processes. We aim to help them evolve from a tactical approach to strategic planning, involving HR and business leaders with long-term benefits. To learn more, contact us.