for Developing and Managing Your Company’s Employees
Explicit identification, inventory and tracking of skills has become more important in the modern workplace. These skills can be concrete functional technical capabilities, such as programming in JavaScript, building an Excel spreadsheet, or operating a forklift. They can also be “softer” skills including teamwork skills, leadership skills and communication skills. Taxonomies (libraries or collections of skills) such as US Department of Labor’s O*Net, EMSI, and the Open Skills Network European Union’s ESCO provide large collections of skills to address many to most workforce occupations. These are useful for recruiting, job seekers, and educational institutions. They are an important step forward in managing large workforces.
However, some taxonomies do not provide the proficiency levels necessary for most corporate use cases of developing, managing and placing employees, which limits their usefulness. An accurate inventory of skills powers many corporate scenarios. These include staffing projects, employee’s finding new opportunities internally and progressing their career, managers developing their people, executives preparing succession plans, and HR partners finding people for temporary assignments.
For all of these tasks it is insufficient to identify binary possession of a skill. As an example, most corporate employees have the “project management” skills at some level, as most employees work on projects. They know what objectives, phases and deliverables are. To manage a large, complex project, much more is required. To take that role, they need to be at a level 3 or higher. This means communicating reporting requirements, creating monitoring methods, conducting project review, identifying risks and creating contingency plans.
In this document we will discuss how “level-less” taxonomies can be used and problems with them. Then we will describe how taxonomies with proficiency levels can enable other uses and provide much more value to running a company and managing its employees effectively. Finally we will discuss some best practices in managing proficiency level taxonomies to address challenges that taxonomies with proficiency levels can present.
Taxonomies without Proficiency Levels
If a skill does not have defined proficiency levels, we can describe them as “binary tags”. The employee either has the skill or does not have it. This can be useful in recruiting for example. You can narrow a list of candidates based on identified interests and career paths. It gives clues to interviewers about what questions can be asked. Typically it does not give indication of suitability for a role except for the most entry level positions, where it is usually assumed that further development needs to occur.
Once an employee is part of the company the “skills as tags” approach begins to break down. For example, the skill of “project management” is one that most employees of a company have. Most employees work on some project. They understand the concept of phases, activities, tasks and deliverables or they could not function as productive team members.
The skills necessary to lead large complex projects are a much broader list including identifying risks and creating contingency plans, conducting project reviews, and performing estimations of cost and schedule of complex projects with many dependencies. Most people identifying a project management skill do not have this more advanced competency.
A solution to this problem that can be seen in “binary skill tag taxonomies” is to attempt to explode a simpler skill tag into many different tags. This could be: “project management as team member”, “managing single team short term projects”, and “coordinating complex multiple team projects”. Most skills however have a more and more complex bundle of behaviors as employees progress to higher levels. So the combinatorial explosion of skills results in much more than multiplying tags bv the four identified skill levels. The resulting taxonomies typically number in the tens of thousands, which creates a problem for both employees identifying their skills and for maintainers of taxonomies to avoid duplication of skills in the collection. Also, because of the vast scope of the “tag libraries” they typically do not have explicit skill descriptions which leads to ambiguity as to their true meaning.
As a result, corporate “skill inventories” (collections of skills held by each employee) with binary skill tags usually result in little ability to understand who can do what job, what skills each job really entails, and, most critically, how employees can develop their skills to become better at their current job and progress their career further to other roles.
Recognizing this limitation, some skills-related software vendors who have skill taxonomies without levels have introduced levels but with no descriptions of their behavior. One vendor has gone so far as to introduce eight (8!) proficiency levels, but with no description of the proficiencies there. Of course without descriptions there is no way to determine what level of proficiency an employee holds. This is the equivalent of a taxonomy with no proficiency levels as no one (including the employee) can determine objectively what level of proficiency they are. Given the descriptions mentioned above, you could probably identify whether you were a 1 or a 3 in project management. With no descriptions and an eight level scale however, we believe you would be challenged to answer what level of project management you are. Undescribed proficiency levels are equivalent to not having proficiency levels at all.
Taxonomies with Proficiency Levels
A taxonomy that is useful for understanding employee capabilities needs to recognize that virtually all skills used in productive work have a continuous progression. Typically level 1 of that progression indicates basic familiarity with the concepts and terms of the skill, level 2 then allows productive work with the skill, level 3 indicates advanced proficiency with the skill and the ability to mentor others in it, level 4 is usually rare and indicates being a subject matter expert in the skill. To ensure proper identification of the level (especially level 2 versus level 3) descriptions of behaviors of proficiencies are critical.
Maintaining such descriptions is a significant task, especially for technical and functional skills that change rapidlyover time. But the result is far more useful for common corporate scenarios: staffing projects, developing and promoting staff, assessing job performance, building high-performing teams, identifying new team members, and performing succession planning.
While the value of skill taxonomies with proficiency levels is much higher for the company and the employee there are challenges to building and tailoring a taxonomy for a company and keeping these taxonomies current and accurate.
Best Practices In Managing Proficiency Level Taxonomies
In Empath’s mission of building corporate skills inventories for companies, we have seen several strategies make this challenge manageable.
Leverage Existing Content
While your company no doubt has skills that are unique to your business, the majority of skills will be present in other companies, and certainly in companies in your industry. There is no need to build your library of skills from scratch. There is an entire industry, from major consulting firms to boutique skills specialists, in providing a starting taxonomy of skills. They typically represent decades of distilled knowledge of critical behaviors for each proficiency level. Prominent skill taxonomy products including IBM’s Talent Framework, and consultancies such as EY who start with base corporate skill taxonomies and customize them to your needs. Some skills-focused software providers provide a skills taxonomy as part of their offering. Empath is one of these with our Empath Proficiency Library, a core of a few hundred skills and behavioral descriptions of proficiency levels.
Conduct Regular Reviews
Skills level descriptions change rapidly, especially in technical and functional skills. Your employees and managers have this knowledge. A regular cadence of reviews of skills, distributed to subject matter experts within your organization can keep them current. The review process should include a second validator for each description and a final review by a skills generalist (typically from Human Resources) to ensure consistency of length, tone, and terminology across skills.
Solicit Ongoing Feedback from Employees
Your employees care about their skills and proficiency levels. They will have opinions about what behavior exemplifies each level. Have a process to gather their feedback, outside of the context of interim reviews of the taxonomy. This feedback can be fed into the review process just described.
Tie to the Job Architecture
The biggest value of the skills taxonomy is identifying which jobs require which skills at which proficiency level. The benefits and challenges of building such a job architecture are beyond the scope of this document. But your skills taxonomy should be validated against that job architecture. Are you tracking skills no longer needed by your identified job roles? Consider paring them out. Do your skill level descriptions make sense with respect to the jobs that use them? As an example, there are many behaviors associated with being “level 3-Advanced” in Python. But as a practical matter, your job roles will likely not require many of them. It may be worth editing those descriptions down.
Analyze Your Skills Inventory
Perhaps the most powerful technique, but least used, in optimizing your skills taxonomy is to monitor the inventory quantitatively on an ongoing basis. For example, if a skill is possessed by only a handful of employees, and its need is not expected to grow, it may not be useful to track or offer learning opportunities for it. If the quantity of skill prevalence is increasing, it is worth paying particular attention to editing that skill’s proficiency levels for accuracy. Finally, the use of skills in job skills architecture should be examined. If some skills are not used often in your job skills architecture they can be removed.
Conclusion
Skill taxonomies can be enormously valuable in managing and developing your company’s employees. While taxonomies with no proficiency levels can have value, especially for new hires, that value is limited for ongoing employee development and most corporate uses of skill inventories. Taxonomies with proficiency levels have much more utility in most corporate scenarios of skills usage, while also presenting challenges in construction and maintenance. There are best practices available to make these challenges manageable.
