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Skills Library and Profiling web service from It’s Your Skills

This document introduces the Skills Library and profiling web service; the intent behind it and the features of the same. Further, it goes on to explain how the Skills Library and Profiling web service can be used for different purposes by different users.

The key highlights of the SLP engine are: ► Provides for mapping of skills in a standard template that can be used for

different purposes and by everybody

► The skills library is quite exhaustive and is dynamically updated to include more skills

► The SLP engine is a web service that can be used by different users for different purposes

It’s Your Skills offers SLP web service to providers of products and services in the HR tech space as well as users of HR tech in their companies. The API on the skills library and the plugin on the skills profiling provides the power and flexibility to develop skills-centric applications.

Key web links:It’s Your Skills – www.itsyourskills.com

Skills Profile – www.itsyourskills.com/skills-profile

SLP API – www.itsyourskills.com/skills-profile-api

We would be happy to discuss your thoughts and ideas on SLP engine.

Please write to me – Ashish Kole, connect@itsyourskills.com

Copyright 2014, 3D Talent Services

The need for SLPHR is one of the most unstructured domains or disciplines. Compare this with other disciplines such as finance, healthcare, materials or retail and we can sense how unstructured HR is. And this is a problem indeed. For example, resumes are the most commonly used mechanism for articulation of one’s skills profile. (Note: We use the word skills loosely to include commonly understood skills, competencies, talent and others.) And everyone’s resume is different. Thus an apple to apple comparison is not possible. People need to read through texts (in an era when minimum text is the norm) of different resumes to make comparison. Well, this is one of the limitation. There are several others all of which will be overcome with SLP as we will see as we go through the document.

Benefits of standardization and dataficationThis is an era where many disciplines are immensely benefiting from big data and analytics. But this is possible only if

we have data in a standardized manner. Unfortunately such benefit eludes HR space simply because we do not have standardization nor data.

Datafication and thereon skills analytics will immensely benefit from the technologies such as big data and analytics. What it will result in simple – empower the individuals to make better choices on their talent development and engagement. They will be able to make better choices on what skills to develop and where to deploy them better. The same is true for companies. Skills analytics will empower companies better inventory, utilize, deploy and develop skills within their enterprises.

Oh, btw the focus is on skills in particular and not people in generalIn HR we talk about engaging people, developing people and so forth. This “people” is a generic superset. Medicine focuses on health of people. Finance focuses on money or people. HR needs to focus on skills of people. Skills is that

Copyright 2014, 3D Talent Services

resource that needs to be harnessed, deployed and developed.

There are three important observations on today’s talent landscape why skills become important factor:

► Skills are changing and emerging far more rapidly. Many of today’s hot skills did not exist few years back including those such as cloud, big data.

► Businesses are becoming complex with creation of products and services needing skills in diverse areas. No wonder a car company Ford advertises for as many software professionals as do other IT companies. ***

► Employment is passe. What is in is engagement of skills. And engagement can happen in several ways – full time employment, temping, moonlighting etc. ****

Graduation of HRISHRIS and companies that use HRIS need to graduate in line with the two

profound changes that we have talked about so far:

► Need for focus on skills. Need for developing and deploying them better.

► Need for standardization and datafication of skills to benefit from big data and analytics to empower individuals and enterprises.

Most HRIS and users of HRIS focus on information on people other than pertaining to skills. Information on employee background information, payroll, attrition, leave, time sheets etc. However, the focus on skills is at a very rudimentary stage. In most cases skills are not part of the coverage. And even when they are, it is mostly on the behavioral side (and mostly called competencies).

There is lot of talk and web space on talent analytics. We find that mostly they are talking of analytics on employee information – those that we are referring to above. And not on skills.

Skills need to be mapped, measured, inventoried, analysed and become

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the basis of business decisions. HRIS needs to graduate to fulfill this need of businesses.

Way forward on skills standardization and dataficationSLP is a very simple and commonsensical solution. Lets look at the problem of resumes we discussed above. Instead of different resumes for different people can we not have a simple standard form in which everyone maps one’s skills. After all of us use such standard forms – for example in entering geographical information in say E Commerce sites, social profile in social media sites and so on. Yes, a standard form for skills would be very useful.

People often ask us why that if it is so simple and commonsensical a solution, no one else has created such a form so far. The problem is that the skills space is far too complex, diverse and dynamic unlike geography or social preferences.

This is the problem that It’s Your Skills has solved – creating that common

form for all in whichever domain or function or industry one is in and. And the offering is SLP – Skills Library and Profiling engine

Skills libraryAs the name suggests, the SLP is a library or taxonomy or lexicon of skills. It covers skills in different functions or domain or industry. The second aspect is its coverage. It is holistic and in-depth. The third aspect is that it is dynamic

We have mapped skills in different industries and functions (Accounts, Information Technology, Engineering and so on). Thus it is not a dump of skills (like dictionary being a dump of words) but is a classified organization of skills (like the organization of words in say an encyclopedia or books in a library )

The skills library is holistic and in-depth. The skills cover functional / technical skills as well as behavioral / cognitive skills. And in functional / technical skills the skills are organized under sections such as specialization, tools & technologies one uses, principles & concepts one knows, domains in which

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one has worked and activities one has performed. And these skills layer by layer takes a person down to mapping his or her skill in detail.

Finally, the skills library is dynamic. We constantly update the skills library with skills that’s not been covered so far or that emerge. We deploy human intelligence and technology to enable this process of dynamic updation.

Skills profilingSkills profiling is an application or user interaction layer that sits on top of the library for creating of skills profile. Imagine this to be a menu card of skills. But a large complex menu card – at the backend. While being simple at the front end. Without simplicity this will fail.

Also the profiling provides for not just mapping skills but also for measurement of skills or rather indicating proficiencies in different skills. This measure of proficiencies can be by self or by others (peers, interviewers, managers)

Use of Skills Library and Profiling engineThink of the different use cases as follows:

► Creating a skills profile of self for self assessment & development

► Creating skills profile of jobs in lieu of unstructured job descriptions

► Getting skills profiles of applicants to jobs, all in the same strucutured template

► Assessment of proficiencies and capturing of the same in the skills profile

► Inventorying skills in the company and thus planning for develop or hire decisions

► Responding to new business opportunities by bringing diverse skills together

► Helping individuals understand gaps in their skills

► Finding right sources for developing gaps in skills

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► Giving feedback to employees based on skill gaps

There is a lot that we can do with the SLP engine. We can take HRIS and talent analytics and make them skills-centric to improve effectiveness.

SLP for HRIS companies and users of HRISOur idea on SLP is that we would love to provide to any user who wishes to get on to becoming skills-centric or provides services in the talentscape.

Thus we provide SLP as web services. We ourselves use the web service / API

to create and offer an a SAAS based Enterprise Skills Management (ESM).

Thus we are not competing with HRIS. We wish to be partners of HRIS and users of HRIS. We want to build our expertise in skills analytics and share the same as tools for others to use.

This web service model means you do not have to disrupt any of your existing platform or applications to offer skills-centric solutions. You can build applications and take the data on skills for the SLP including the presentation layer i.e. the profiling part.

References****

Ford advertises as many jobs in software as many a midsized tech firm.The Economisthttp://www.economist.com/news/business/21644150-battle-software-talent-other-industries-can-learn-silicon-valley-how-bag

****

The EconomistIssue: Workers on Taphttp://www.economist.com/printedition/2015-01-03