What is Skills Tracking and How Can You Implement It?

Understanding your company’s skill set is essential for optimising operations and setting realistic goals. Without these insights, organisations often struggle to coordinate projects and manage talent effectively. This can result in inefficiencies and increase the risk of career stagnation for employees who feel their skills aren’t being put to good use.

Skills tracking offers a structured approach to developing and leveraging workforce skills. This article defines skills tracking, explores its benefits, and provides a step-by-step guide for tracking skills across your organisation. We’ll also cover challenges, best practices, methods for tracking hard and soft skills, and different types of skills-tracking software.

What is Skills Tracking?

Skills tracking is a strategic approach to identifying, measuring and developing skills across an organisation. It gives businesses a clear picture of existing skills and those needed to meet their goals. It can also help them create employee training plans to address skill gaps.

Skills tracking measures abilities individually or across teams and departments. When used organisation-wide, it enhances team collaboration, project management, and adaptability. It is often used as a tool for long-term workforce and succession planning. It also promotes skill mobility, helping companies transition employees between roles, tasks, or projects to maximise their skills.

10 Benefits of Skills Tracking

1. Improves Workplace Culture. Tracking skills cultivates a company culture of continuous learning and shows employees that their growth is valued. This increases job satisfaction and strengthens employees’ connection to your organisation.
2. Reduces Employee Turnover. Employees who feel that their skills are valued and being put to good use are less likely to leave a company. Lorman reports that 70% of employees would leave their jobs to work for companies that prioritise skill development as part of their company culture.
3. Boosts Productivity. Effective skills tracking ensures employees are in roles that align with their strengths, and helps them develop new skills in their positions. This leads to greater confidence and productivity as employees use their skills effectively.
4. Enhances Employee Engagement. Tracking skills can help you to personalise training to an individual’s needs and role. This increases their engagement with training materials and your company, as they see you value their continuous professional development.
5. Reduces Risk of Outdated Skills. Skill tracking helps prevent skill stagnation by regularly assessing employee abilities against both current and future skills for business needs. This encourages employees to upskill and reskill in ways that boost productivity, improve efficiency, and ensure they stay aligned with the latest best practices.
6. Aligns Training to Business Needs. Training is valuable, but tracking employee skills across your business enables you to develop specific abilities that directly support your goals. This targeted approach helps businesses grow faster and even exceed their objectives.
7. Increases Adaptability. As business needs evolve, your workforce must be ready to adapt. By tracking skills across your organisation, you can quickly reassign employees to roles where their skills are most needed, enhancing adaptability.
8. Staying Competitive. Market demands are constantly shifting, requiring businesses to adapt to remain relevant. Skills tracking equips you to easily identify new opportunities and adjust your offerings to meet these changing needs effectively.
9. Improves Contingency Planning. Sudden changes can significantly impact business operations. Skills tracking allows you to adapt more quickly if employees leave or become unavailable, supporting succession planning and ensuring that teams—not just individuals—possess the necessary skills for success.
10. Effective Talent Management. Skill tracking can help businesses balance the advantages and disadvantages of internal recruiting and external hiring. This ensures your business maintains a strong talent pipeline with the right skills available when you need them.

How to Track Employee Skills

1. Make a Skills Inventory

To start your skills tracking process, create a skills database of available abilities and skills your business needs to meet objectives. Conducting a skills audit is an invaluable part of the process. Once you have an inventory of the skills you have and need, there are various techniques you can use to categorise, visualise and connect them.

• Skills mapping visually represents the skills within a team or organisation, identifying strengths and skill gaps for targeted development.
• A skills taxonomy organises skills into a structured classification, grouping related abilities hierarchically to clarify relationships and dependencies.
• A skills framework provides a standardised set of skills and competencies required for multiple roles, aligning expectations across an organisation.
• Skills ontology defines the relationships between skills, often using semantic connections to describe how different skills interrelate within a broader ecosystem.
• A skills matrix cross-references employees and their proficiency levels across required competencies, helping identify who is skilled in what areas and where skills gaps exist.

2. Create a Clear Overview

Assign skills to specific roles where they’ll add the most value. Some roles may require specialised skills, making this an ideal opportunity to identify employees who possess them or could benefit from targeted training. This will also help you recognise versatile employees whose skills can be used across different roles and departments. These multi-skilled employees are often strong candidates for leadership roles or training positions.

3. Set Proficiency Benchmarks

Break required skills down into what is needed for basic, intermediate and advanced proficiency. This will provide you with a consistent measurement for assessing skills across your workforce and help you identify skill gaps and areas for improvement.

Let’s look at communication skills, for example.

• Basic proficiency would be expressing ideas clearly in conversation and understanding and following instructions.
• Intermediate proficiency would involve presenting ideas in small group settings and providing clear, constructive feedback.
• Advanced proficiency may include leading presentations and meetings confidently and handling sensitive conversations with diplomacy.

4. Find the Right Skills Management Software

Various software platforms support skill tracking. Finding the one that fits your business’s unique needs will involve reviewing features and integrations with systems and processes. For example, if you already conduct skill assessments, look for a solution to either enhance evaluations or integrate with your existing assessment software.

The platform you choose should be user-friendly and intuitive. This will increase adoption throughout your business, maximising the return on your investment.

5. Align Skills with Training Programs

Use the skills data you’ve gathered to develop effective employee training plans. These can be tailored to individual needs, or implemented across a team or company. Tying your skills tracking into your training initiatives enables you to optimise resources to support business goals alongside employee growth. It will also help your teams better understand their roles in your operations, improving employee engagement.

6. Update and Evaluate

It’s critical to review, update and manage skills tracking regularly. This ensures accurate records of employee abilities and helps with easily identifying new skills for development. Since there are numerous approaches that businesses can take to skills tracking you may also want to consider whether other tracking techniques would optimise your operations and perfect your skill training.

Best Practices for Effective Skill Tracking

• Track skills across teams and individuals. It’s important to conduct skill tracking not only for each employee but for entire teams as well. This ensures that workloads can be shared, reducing stress and the risk of burnout.
• Continuous assessment. Skill development doesn’t happen all at once. This is why it’s critical to conduct continuous assessments, ensuring that proficiency levels are consistently improving.
• Consider skill tracking during performance reviews. Evaluations are the perfect opportunity for reviewing skills and proficiencies. 360 Performance reviews, for example, can help you evaluate an employee’s skill sets from multiple perspectives, rather than relying solely on assessment results.
• Encourage employee participation. Encouraging employee self-assessment can help you gauge where individuals think their strengths and weaknesses lie. This form of skill tracking can also help you identify candidates who want to take on more responsibility in future leadership positions.

How to Track Hard Skills vs Hard Skills

Technical skills and power skills aren’t easy to track in the same way. This is why it’s important to consider different tracking techniques for measurement and development.

Hard skills are relatively easy to measure through assessments, performance metrics and certifications. For example, if you wanted to measure programming skills, you could enrol employees in relevant courses or conduct on-the-job training evaluations to see how well they understand and use a specific programming language.

Soft skills are based on behaviours rather than direct results, making them more difficult to track. For example, if you want to determine an employee’s emotional intelligence (EI), you could observe them over time and speak to their colleagues. This will give you a better understanding of their EI proficiency than an assessment would.

How to Overcome Challenges in Implementing Skill Tracking

Resistance to Change

Employees and managers may be reluctant to adopt new skills-tracking systems, especially if they view it as time-consuming or unnecessary.

Solution: Clearly communicate the benefits and purpose behind skills tracking. This will help them to see the value of their development alongside the benefits for your company.

Inconsistent Data Entry

Without clear guidelines, employees may assess their own or their team’s skills inconsistently, leading to unreliable or incomplete data.

Solution: Using the right skills tracking software, standardised metrics, and conducting regular evaluations can help you streamline the process and improve consistency.

Time and Resource Constraints

Implementing an effective skills-tracking system requires significant time and resources. Small to mid-sized companies might struggle to allocate the necessary budget or personnel to properly set up and maintain the system.

Solution: Find a software solution that automates part of the process. This will reduce the administrative burden. Integrated tools like Cloud Assess that accommodate various skills tracking and development functionality can also help you to maximise your return on investment.

Skills Tracking Software

• Skills matrix software. An invaluable tool for visualising skills and proficiencies. Integrated skills matrices connect proficiency levels with assessment results and training initiatives, streamlining skills tracking and development.
• Training matrix software. This software provides a visual representation of metrics like learner progress, completion rates, and certification attainment. This helps companies gauge the effectiveness of training programs.
• Learning Management System (LMS). Software for developing and delivering training courses. Some LMS platforms include features like personalised learning paths, automated enrolment, and advanced reporting on course effectiveness.
• Assessment software. An essential tool for evaluating existing and new skills and knowledge. Different platforms will accommodate different types of assessment, making it important for you to find one that meets your training and skill development needs.

Enhance Skills Tracking for a Future-Ready Workforce

Effective skills tracking can transform workforce capabilities and drive organisational growth. By implementing an all-in-one solution like Cloud Assess, businesses can streamline their skills management processes with integrated features like skills matrices, training matrices, and LMS functionality, all while simplifying assessments.

This comprehensive approach enhances both workforce development and operational efficiency. Ready to experience its impact? Start your Explore Pricing today and see the difference.