Continuous skills assessments are crucial to developing and deploying a strategic talent management plan. In this blog post, discover seven evaluation methods that will help you accurately assess your employees’ skills and competencies.

Effective skills assessments start with intentional planning. Before you can implement skills assessments, you need to define the scope of the assessment and identify which skills your organization most needs to be successful. To do that, you need a thorough understanding of the following:

• Your organization’s mission and business goals
• The extent to which your company values hard and soft skills
• Which skills are critical to achieving success, and how success is measured

You also need to establish comparison metrics that are free of bias so you can objectively evaluate your employees. Biased evaluations can yield inaccurate results about your employees’ skills and competencies. Using inaccurate data to inform decisions about how to deploy your talent or where to focus your skills development resources will likely lead to implementing ineffective strategies that don’t support your business goals.

It’s important to bear this in mind when you determine the best way to measure your workforce competencies. Consider using a combination of the following common evaluation methods to get a more holistic and less biased look at your employees’ skills.

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1) Performance Reviews

Annual performance reviews are a great starting point for gathering data about your workforce skills. Formal evaluations give you concrete metrics about how well employees performed throughout the year. The data can show you where individuals shine and which competencies they should strive to improve to be more effective employees.

Performance reviews shouldn’t be your only data source when you implement your workforce skills assessments, though. Despite your organization’s best efforts, annual performance review metrics aren’t always an accurate reflection of employee competencies. According to a 2022 survey, only 35% of organizations indicate that their employees feel their performance is evaluated fairly. Such a low percentage doesn’t necessarily strike a chord of confidence in the validity of these reviews. Still, performance reviews give you a place to start and help you establish a baseline for your workforce’s skills as you gear up to conduct a more robust assessment.

2) Work History

Employee work history is an objective way for you to assess an individual’s skills. Consider the deliverables for each role and the skills that are necessary to achieve optimum results. How adept are your employees at producing those deliverables? Look at whether their tasks are completed on time and how individual contributions impact your overarching business goals.

Also look at how often a person has needed extra coaching related to specific competencies. Frequent coaching instances, especially those relating to the same or similar tasks, could indicate a gap in skills or knowledge (or both). If one or two employees seem to struggle with a particular skill or competency, it’s likely not indicative of a widespread organizational skills gap. On the other hand, finding many instances of employees in your enterprise appearing to struggle with a concept could very likely be a sign of an organizational knowledge or skills gap that needs greater attention to minimize.

3) Self-Assessments

Employee self-assessments, while subjective, are powerful tools for kickstarting your organization’s skills evaluation initiative. You can leverage your talent management software to send your employees a self-evaluation. Let them quickly identify their own skills and competencies, and compare their perceptions with your other data sources.

Look for inconsistencies in the data, such as an individual claiming to have weak or developing skills in a particular area when their work history indicates that they’re actually quite competent in that task. You could also have the opposite scenario: an employee’s self-evaluation states they have advanced interpersonal communication skills, but their work history demonstrates a pattern of frequent miscommunications or altercations with their peers.

Employee self-assessments should never be your singular data source, but they will give you context regarding your workforce’s perceptions of their own abilities. This insight is invaluable. Knowing how your employees see themselves will shape how you view the data from your skills assessments, as well as how you implement professional development and training.

Some workers might be in for a surprise if they already feel like they’ve mastered competencies only to find that they actually have significant skills or knowledge gaps. It’s difficult to say how someone will react in this situation. Be prepared for this possibility, and ensure your plan to help them improve their skills includes approaching them with empathy and respect.

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4) Peer Reviews

Robust talent management software will allow your employees to solicit feedback from their managers, coworkers, and other people they interact with in your organization. The feedback is stored in the employee’s performance profile. Reviewing any relevant feedback regarding skills and competencies alongside an employee’s self-assessment will give you a clearer picture of that person’s true capabilities.

5) Structured Interviews

You might choose to conduct follow-up assessments if you need more clarification or information about a person’s performance and competencies. You can leverage structured interviews with predefined questions to reveal an individual’s various skills and abilities. Be mindful when you create your questions. They should be unbiased so every employee has the same opportunity to demonstrate their skills fairly.

6) Simulations and Role-Playing Exercises

Sometimes the best way to assess skills is to see your employees in action. Simulations or role-play scenarios let you observe how employees behave so you can assess soft skills like problem-solving, decision-making, or interpersonal communication. It’s one thing for a performance review or self-assessment to state that an individual has strong problem-solving skills. It’s quite another to present the employee with a complex problem and observe as they figure out a solution.

Simulations could prove especially useful in high-consequence industries like healthcare, aviation, manufacturing, and others to assess specific on-the-job competencies in a low-stakes environment. For example, a healthcare organization can use a CPR training manikin in a role-playing scenario to assess how nurses, doctors, and other medical professionals respond during a patient emergency. Assessors can observe their employees’ skills and competencies without exposing patients to any risks. Simulations and role-playing are powerful tools for assessing skills and competencies in your workforce.

7) Skills Tests

Not all skills are easy to observe in-action. Computer-based jobs often involve competencies that are better suited to skills tests rather than simulations. A skills test can take many forms and should be thoughtfully designed to remove bias. It’s also crucial to only assess the specific skills and competencies as they relate to the employee’s job.

For instance, a skills test for a software engineer should not be analyzing that employee’s sentence structure or spelling. Poor spelling isn’t indicative of the software engineer’s ability to code. If you’re assessing your social media manager, however, then you’ll want to pay close attention to how they command language since a large portion of their work involves engaging with your clients and prospects. In that scenario, you want to be sure that the social media manager is capable of communicating effectively.

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Next Steps: Gather and Analyze Your Data

You can’t close skills gaps if you don’t know the extent of your workforce’s knowledge and abilities. Conducting skills assessments will give you that data, but you need to have a plan for how you’ll gather and analyze it. Ultimately, the information you collect should help you take proactive measures to:

• Identify the most crucial competencies for your organization’s success
• Retain individuals with highly sought-after skills
• Implement tactics to enhance your employees’ knowledge and capabilities

Analyzing your data won’t help you if the information you gather isn’t an accurate reflection of your employees’ competencies. To ensure that the data is as accurate (and helpful!) as possible, carefully consider how you’ll design your skills evaluations. Align your evaluations with the requirements of whatever role you’re assessing, and personalize the assessments whenever you can. Whether you’re using formal performance reviews, role-playing scenarios, or another assessment method, be mindful of:

• Each employee’s job description and performance expectations
• The skills necessary to produce their deliverables
• Your employees’ individual needs, such as any disability accommodations

You want to avoid any biases that could skew the results of your skills assessments. Making business decisions based on biased results could be detrimental to your efforts and create bigger problems down the line. It’s best to mitigate those risks by accounting for any factors that could make an individual’s skills evaluation appear as though they lack competencies or knowledge. Evaluation results that suggest a lack of skills could potentially be attributed to a missing accommodation or a misalignment of performance expectations.

Use Assessment Data to Inform Your Strategy

Once you’re confident that you’ve accounted for biases and have designed effective assessments, you can use them to guide your workforce development plans. The data will show you exactly how specific skills are currently being deployed across your organization. Look at each department or business unit and identify any areas for improvement.

If you find that multiple people in a department lack a particular skill that’s essential for them to do their job effectively, that’s a good indicator that the team might benefit from some professional development workshops or courses that target those missing competencies. For example, if your data shows that multiple nurses across your healthcare organization struggle with effective communication, you should consider providing learning opportunities to help your employees improve their patient bedside manner. Let your data lead your initiatives so you are investing in effective solutions.