What is skills tracking software?

Skills tracking software enables you to stay on top of your skills training programme. Each and every job role at your company requires your employee to possess specific abilities to ultimately be successful. If any of these skills are missing or underdeveloped, it can hinder your employee’s overall performance and ultimately hurt your bottom line.

By empowering your workforce to upgrade their skill sets, you can improve employee satisfaction and increase productivity across the board. A good solution goes beyond basic HR software and identifies critical aspects of your company’s job roles. By breaking down each job role into bite-sized skills, you can add training modules for each skill until you’ve built an impressive foundation of abilities for everyone in your organisation. How do you keep track of the skills everyone needs?

First things first: create a skills inventory

Taking stock of the skills that your workforce already possesses will give you a starting point for what you need to improve. By creating a skills inventory, you can see who has mastered which skill with a simple glance at their training profile. Building an employee skills database is the quickest way to focus your efforts on the areas that need the most improvement.

Training courses should focus on improving skills, not an end result or activity. Saying you want sales reps to increase their close rate is all well and good, but doesn’t include actionable steps to achieve the goal. What skills go into achieving better sales numbers per individual rep? A good skills inventory break down for “Closing Sales” might look like:

• Active Listening
• Problem Solving
• Offering Incentives

These are all skills that a rep likely uses during the sales process. Which ones do your employees excel at, and which abilities need more work? You need to compile an employee skills database to find out.

Benefits of skills tracking software

Stop wasting time and energy training employees on abilities they’ve already mastered, and don’t let critical skills gaps fall through the cracks. There are substantial benefits that result from using a skills database software to track what your employees do and don’t know. Here are just a few.

1. Improved workforce

A workforce with the skills and tools they need to succeed will perform better, close more sales, deliver better service, and ultimately generate more revenue. No one likes feeling helpless or under-equipped. Anyone who feels confident and secure in their role naturally performs better. And when you put real effort into skills improvement, you make your employees feel valued and appreciated, which can raise workplace productivity by as much as 50%.

2. Increased retention

In a survey of 2,000 professionals, 73% chose “boredom” as the reason they left their jobs. Nothing is worse than feeling as if you’re fully interchangeable with everyone else and that you don’t matter as an individual. Ongoing development and skills training make your employees feel as though you’ve invested in them, and makes them much more likely to stay. Given that high turnover rates cost businesses a significant amount of money yearly, it’s well worth investing in anything that improves employee retention rates.

3. Optimised training and development programmes

In 2018, corporate training and development spending across the US reached nearly $88 billion. Businesses realise that ongoing improvement is necessary for peak productivity, but unfortunately, most of that money is wasted on day-long seminars that no one really remembers afterwards. The best way to improve employee engagement and retention when it comes to learning is to make each course relevant to the jobs they perform daily. And, comprehensive skills tracking software makes assigning relevant courses more manageable than ever.

Create a visual skills matrix with skills mapping software

Now that you’ve taken stock of the skills that your employees already have as well as the ones you’d like to improve, it’s time to take the next step. Implementing skills training won’t be practical unless you can tie it to measurable improvements afterwards. Are you trying to increase overall sales or lower the time it takes to close each deal? Perhaps you want to focus on both—but you need to separate the skills necessary for these results into separate categories.

Skills mapping software is a great tool for creating a visual representation of your skills matrix. This “skills map” will tell you who knows what and who still needs some work. It doesn’t matter whether you use a pie chart, a graph, or slowly fill up a status bar, as long as it accurately reflects your progress.

Reaching the final visual map should look something like this:

1. Use a skills mapping template to evaluate individual employees, entire departments, and your company as a whole.
2. Then, skills mapping software rates their proficiency, aggregates the data, and generates a flow chart.
3. Implement improvement programmes, assign skills training to your employees, and allow a period for the results to take effect.
4. Re-evaluate the data and measure any improvements. In what areas did your skills training have the most effect? Which departments showed the most improvement?
5. That data generates a new flow chart. You now have a visual representation of the real-world impacts of your skills improvement efforts.

This skills mapping exercise shouldn’t become a sinkhole of time and effort, and with quality skills mapping software, it isn’t. Most (if not all) of this process should happen in the background without much conscious effort from your training managers.

Skill mapping of employees is critical for business success. Using the right software, you can see exactly how your efforts manifest in real-world KPIs like total sales, sales per department, and time spent until closure. Don’t rely on Excel spreadsheets (or its fidgety pie charts) to track one of the most important investments your company can make. Get a skills-tracking software that was actually designed for your needs.

Turn to skills management software

So now that you’ve tracked, inventoried, and mapped your skills matrix, what’s next? There are many ways to track your employees’ skills, but consistently managing these processes takes specific resources. Ensuring that your employees learn new skills and don’t lose perishable ones isn’t easy, but with skills management software, you can put the power of automation on your side.

Learning how to track employee training shouldn’t take the next several years. We make it easy to train, track, and implement skills improvement across your entire company. With our customisable training courses, intuitive dashboard, and the ability to track skill development at scale, we make it easy to run your company’s training programme. See how our comprehensive skills tracking software helps teams like yours deliver personalised skills training here.