You can’t optimize your workforce if you don’t know which skills and competencies your employees possess. Sure, you have access to their talent profiles, but if you’re not assessing employees’ skills on a regular basis, then you’re most likely operating with outdated information. A skills evaluation is a powerful tool for informing your business decisions and enhancing your workplace operations. Consider the following seven benefits of conducting regular skills assessments.

RELATED READING | ‘5 Ways PeopleFluent Supports Your Continuous Feedback Initiatives’

1) Gaining Comprehensive Insights Into Your Workforce

Assuming your organization has a culture of continuous learning, your employees’ abilities will be constantly evolving. Skills assessments help you track these changes and use them to your organization’s advantage. Conducting a skills assessment gives you deeper insights into the competencies that exist in your workforce, allowing you to clearly see each employee’s strengths and the skill areas they need to improve.

With this data at your fingertips, you can optimize your teams and help employees reach their full potential. For example, an employee who is particularly adept at a skill that’s in high demand outside of their regular department could be temporarily reassigned to assist the business unit that’s in need. Conversely, employees who lack necessary skills to excel in their roles can be assigned mentors who have mastered that competency. Conducting regular skills assessments lets you better supervise your workforce and make improvements that ultimately benefit your employees and your business.

2) Identifying and Closing Gaps

Once you know what your employees are capable of and how their skills are deployed across your workforce, you can start looking for knowledge and skills gaps in your organization. Skills assessment data enables you to identify areas of your business that lack essential skills or competencies so you can make a plan to close those gaps.

That could mean redeploying your talent to better suit your needs. For example, a healthcare organization might have a temporary need for more respiratory therapists to handle an influx of patients with respiratory-related ailments. A skills assessment would quickly identify which employees have respiratory credentials and are qualified to care for those patients. The healthcare organization might identify managers, sleep technicians, or other employees who aren’t in a respiratory therapist role but are still qualified to meet those patients’ needs. Those employees could be redeployed to temporarily close that skills gap while the organization works toward a more permanent solution.

PREPARE EMPLOYEES FOR THE FUTURE | ‘3 Ways Succession Planning Improves the Employee Experience’

3) Addressing Skills and Competency Shortages

Temporary redeployment of talent is just that: temporary. Skills assessments can do more than just help you put a bandaid on a skills shortage. Knowing which abilities are in high demand at your organization and combining that knowledge with workforce skills assessments allows you to optimize your talent and develop a plan to upskill and reskill workers. Use the data from these assessments to tailor your professional development strategies to ensure your employees are getting the training they need to achieve successful outcomes.

You may find that despite your training initiatives, your organization’s needs have evolved beyond upskilling and training your current workforce. Regular skills assessments can help you decide when it’s time to create new roles or hire more workers to meet your competency demands.

4) Discovering Untapped Talent

You could be sitting on a goldmine of skills without even knowing it. It’s easy for employees to fly under the radar, especially at mid-size and enterprise companies. Skills assessments help you easily determine which employees have high-level capabilities that aren’t currently being used to their full potential, if at all. Once you’ve discovered these skills, you can assess how best to leverage them to achieve your business goals.

5) Identifying and Retaining Key Employees

Great talent is hard to come by, and LinkedIn’s 2024 Workplace Learning Report found that 90% of organizations are concerned about employee retention. You may have some employees with very unique skillsets that contribute significantly to achieving your business objectives, and these individuals might be difficult to replace should they leave your organization.

Your talent management software should allow you to make note of those employees’ importance to your organization in their skills assessments. This way you can track how their skills develop over time and seek out opportunities to foster their development.

You can also use talent management software to indicate whether these key employees are at risk of leaving your organization. If they are, you can take steps to mitigate the risk and entice them to stay by offering additional incentives.

ENTICE AND RETAIN EMPLOYEES. LEARN HOW IN THIS FREE EBOOK | ‘How to Evolve Your Incentive Strategies With the Changing Workforce’

6) Improving Performance and Increasing Satisfaction

Skills assessments aren’t just for optimizing your business. They’re an opportunity to give your employees valuable feedback about their performance and the skills they need to improve. The vast majority of employees want to learn. Conducting skills assessments gives you the opportunity to share actionable feedback with your employees so they know exactly what skills they need to develop and how they can progress at your organization.

Of course, it’s not enough to point out which skills your employees should improve. They have jobs to do, and they’re not likely to spend their off hours devouring professional development materials. You need to give your employees opportunities for learning and development in the flow of their work. Skills assessments will help you identify which skills to target so you can develop effective training programs that improve competencies and performance metrics.

7) Enhancing Training and Development Programs

Your skill assessments shouldn’t be a “one and done” review. Conduct skills assessments on a regular basis and track your employees’ development. The best-case scenario is that their competencies improve and your organization closes its skills gaps.

If employees aren’t enhancing the skills that your professional development programs are trying to target, it could be an indication that your training needs to be adjusted. Leverage your assessment data to identify trends and make adjustments so you can keep striving toward closing gaps and improving skills across your organization.