Skills Tracking: An Unattainable Ideal?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Career Development   Talent Management  

One of the challenges that I always deal with when working with clients is understanding the talents that exist within the resource pool. People are hired because of the particular skills and experiences that they have, but very often there is no central tracking of those skills. Additionally, the hiring is often done by line managers who may not have quite the same needs as projects, or who may classify skills differently (one person’s “advanced” is another person’s “intermediate”).

Add to that the speed of change in the technology arena--and the constant need to update and upgrade skills--and it can be very difficult to have a resource pool “wide view” of the skills that an organization has available to work on projects. However, without that view it’s very difficult to assign the right people to the right tasks, to ensure that the right training is delivered to the right people at the right time, and hire to fill skills gaps.

In this article, I want to look at why it’s so difficult to achieve--and identify a few possible ways that the current situation can at least be improved.

The concept, and the challenge
Let’s start with the basics and define what we mean by a “skills profile”. A skills profile applies specific capabilities to each of the people in our organization (or at least…

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