How important it is to map the competences of company resources

Corporate News | 08.05.2020

The digital transformation and the current pandemic are changing the demands of companies, which increasingly need to fill a gap in transversal and technical skills.

For some time now, several studies showed that there is a shortage of up-to-date professionals within companies who are able to make the most of all the chances offered by digital transformation.

The acceleration towards technological innovation as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic has further highlighted the need to develop new skills, especially digital ones, both to retrain existing workers within organisations and to respond to the lack of professionals on the market.

A research conducted by Gartner points out that since 2017 the total number of skills required for a single job has increased year-on-year by 10% and one in three skills in a standard job ad in 2017 for positions in IT, finance or sales is already obsolete.

The final result is that 58% of the workforce will need new skills to do their jobs successfully.

Although several companies are committed to hiring new staff to fill this skills gap, not all companies have the financial means to expand their workforce through recruitment, especially after a period of severe crisis such as that generated by the pandemic.

The solution can be found within a process of retraining the existing workforce through the development of training projects.
In order to do so, it is good practice to first conduct a preliminary analysis to measure the competences of the company’s resources and to identify which competences should be the focus of specific training.

Innovative tools in the HR Tech world include SoftSkillLab, an online testing platform for measuring Soft Skills, Personality Traits and Cognitive Skills, to support the needs of HR departments, hiring managers, recruiters and trainers.

The results of these psychometric tests are easy to interpret, even by non-specialist personnel, and allow personalised assessment of company resources, since all skills and competences can be measured individually with an ad hoc test or can be combined for a complete mapping of the transversal competences of employees.