There is a revolution happening in skill tracking. How do you use this data to achieve your business goals?

In case you missed it (somehow), THRIVE has introduced a whole suite of features designed to help you capture data on the skills in your organisation and upskill your teams quickly and efficiently. 

However, we know collecting skills data in real time can be a new concept for many businesses, so we’re here to cover the basics of what data you should be focusing on and how to use this data for business success.

 

What is skills data?

Skills data is any metric or datapoint that gives you an insight into the skills and competencies of an individual within an organisation. 

The best kind of skills data you can get is generated by your users themselves, for example, allowing them to list their own skills so you can get a better understanding of how people view their skills. 

Skills data is incredibly useful for organisations of all sizes, as it allows you to see what skills you may be lacking in, find teams for specific projects, and create tailored learning content for different skills.

 

What skills data should you be collecting?

When selecting metrics to be key performance indicators , it’s imperative you consider what you actually want your platform to do for your learners, rather than going with what the platform offers as trackable metrics. 

One of the key metrics we think has the potential for massive business impact is the combination of content uploads in a skill vs content interest in that skill. This tells you the amount of existing expertise in a given skill and how much demand it has from the people within your business. 

Measuring this allows you to quickly identify where your skill and content gaps are and pivot your content strategy and learning initiatives to fill those gaps for your learners. 

In 2022, we all know that it’s not enough to just churn out content on a topic without first examining the demand and supply of skills within your organisation. You can now discover invaluable information like how users define their skills, how many followers of a certain skill there are and activity around skills, whilst comparing this to the quantity of content you upload, so you can fill content gaps easily and efficiently. 

 

What core skill metric is the key to success?

Put simply, it’s activity. 

Put less simply, it’s the relationship between activity and your view of the L&D landscape within your organisation. Measuring activity for us looks at followers of a skill and content views where the content is tagged with a specific skill, and compares it against the content you are uploading to give you an incredible viewpoint of your L&D initiatives. 

It’s all about data-informed decisions. Getting real time data on the skills in your organisation can reduce L&D costs, maximise the efficiency of your learning initiatives and go a long way to creating an agile skills strategy. 

 

What are you missing out on by not collecting skills data?

More organisations around the world are recognising the importance of skills in the workplace, and the need for a ground-up, agile skills strategy that allows learners to inform your framework.. 

Say goodbye to shoehorning content that your stakeholders believe to be applicable to the entire organisation. And say hello to collecting the data that tells you what your learners need. 

The future of workplace learning  is determined in real time by user input, allowing learners and specialists to inform L&D teams about what skills are important to them and gaining traction. 

By using a platform like THRIVE,  L&D teams can quickly identify emerging skills and have the agility to react efficiently to both new opportunities and content gaps. 

 

Check out our webinar on how modern organisations are changing the way they identify, manage and build the existing and emerging skills in their workforce.

 

Helen Marshall 

Chief Learning Officer, THRIVE