Set up Skills Base
Previous: Welcome!
Help
Before going any further we want you to know that you have access to our help and support at any time in your journey. If you should need assistance, you can simply email us, and we will respond to your request as a high priority need.
You can raise a support ticket that we will respond to as a high priority here: https://www.skills-base.com/technical-support
But you do need to be a paying customer to access our support services. Not to worry, if you are using our free platform, upgrading to a paid account is as inexpensive as $1/user/month (USD).
Concierge and Concierge Plus Onboarding Services
We can guide you through the onboarding process and “hold your hand” as you do it. This is a service which may be included based upon your license tier.
Depending on your license tier and what you selected when buying Skills Base, you will likely have our Concierge Service included as part of your contract. If so, you will receive an email shortly, or may have already received an email, from your Concierge who will walk you through the process to help you get started, answer questions, import data, etc. The Concierge Service includes a dedicated consultant to you for three focused workshops to personally help you onboard Skills Base. They will professionally guide you through this process, help you to set up your data, advise on training and further configuration.
We also offer a "Concierge Plus" service to Ultimate customers. This is “by request” and is usually an additional fee. This takes our Concierge Service to the next level and provides a dedicated Concierge for additional time, which allows for multiple onboarding meetings, additional setup and personal training.
If you do not have the Concierge Service or Concierge Plus, but would like to access it, then you can contact our support desk and we will organize it: https://www.skills-base.com/technical-support
The typical Concierge Service involves the following three key steps conducted over a period between 2 weeks - 2 months:
- An initial "Onboarding" meeting, where your Concierge will step you through the process, provide you with tips and advice, and help you get started,
- Followed by a "Next Steps" meeting to check things went smoothly, answer any questions and guide you to the next step, which might be to iterate the onboarding process and add more data.
- And then a third "Follow Up" meeting to ensure you are successfully using the system and to help you import bulk data records and to set up any additional components (ie: iterate the onboarding process steps covered in this guide).
Why manage skills?
Before going any further it is a good idea to reflect on your goals and what you are trying to get out of Skills Base.
Skills Base has thousands of customers globally. Everyone has a slightly different mix of things they want to achieve with Skills Base. After all, being a Skills Based business means that all your operations can be viewed from the perspective of skills! So, there can be many, many goals with Skills Base. Some of the many benefits and objectives customers have shared are:
- Finding Skills (and people with those skills) within the organization
- Internal job mobility
- Forming Teams
- Recruitment
- Improving and targeting training
- Career planning and progression
- Employee engagement
- Managing competency
- Helping the team to learn emerging and new skills
- M&A integration
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Here are some case studies on how other customers are using Skills Base: https://www.skills-base.com/case-studies
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All of the above capabilities are well supported in the Skills Base system by a range of different tools (like the Career tool, for instance!). You will learn how to use these, later in the training section. BUT before you can get to that you first need data. Making it easy to collect data and then doing something with that data is where Skills Base really shines, and we make it really easy to start inputting the data you need as well as collecting skill insights by conducting skill assessments.
How do we do it?
In Skills Base the “Skill insight” is based on the skill assessments that the team complete. This then allows you to form insights like the following example which reveals potential gaps in personnel skills:
Diagram. The above is a heat matrix showing the skills within a developer team.
It also allows individuals within the team to see a dashboard of their skills, compare the skills they have to the skills they might want to progress their career, provide feedback on their interests, etc. Dashboards like the following are rewarding for staff to see once they complete a simple assessment:
Diagram. The above is a dashboard showing the skills of a team member.
Before we go any further and move onto the next step, there is some additional reading that you might find useful (or you can totally skip over if you want to save time!):
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And finally, a word on our Structured-SubjectiveTM method for assessing skills.
There are generally two ways that you can measure:
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Subjective:
Collecting the opinions of employees and supervisors based on their experience and knowledge of each other, themselves, and the work environment.
Measuring ability subjectively is the easiest and fastest way to achieve results. These results can also be reasonably accurate.
Although reasonably accurate on an individual basis, a purely subjective method can produce inconsistencies due to interpretation through lack of structure.
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Objective:
Can be an accurate way to assess a person's skills because it decreases or eliminates bias and applies methodology to measurement.
Implementing this process can require significant planning and coordination, and generally requires the organization as a whole to adopt a structured approach to Skills Management. It is more difficult to undertake and potentially results in little to no value.
Why our Structured-SubjectiveTM method is so good.
We have devised a method over a decade of R&D and in consultation with hundreds of our customers, which includes many fortune 500 companies.
We have found that the best method for measuring ability should achieve a balance by taking advantage of the benefits that a subjective approach offers, whilst introducing objectivity to the process.
The Skills Base Structured-SubjectiveTM approach achieves this through seven key components:
- Utilising an organization-authored assessment
- Providing a fixed, structured list of skills with detailed descriptions
- Grouping skills by job function or organizational structure
- Providing a fixed, universal numeric rating scheme
- Specifying the criteria for each rating via a detailed description
- Conducting an employee self-assessment
- Performing an additional, supervisor-conducted assessment
And it’s simple. The Structured-SubjectiveTM method makes Skills Base very easy to deploy and to quickly get insights from your team.
Before proceeding to the next section and starting to Enter Your Data, we recommend you review the three documents below which will provide more interesting reading on setting up skills and performing skill assessments.
Attachments and Resources
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Skill Library Guide.pdf |
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Skill Assessment Guide.pdf |
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Skill Identification Guide.pdf |
Next: Entering skills data