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Skills Library and Profiling web service from Its YourSkills
This document introduces the Skills Library and profiling web
service; the intent behind it and the features of the same.
Further, it goes on to explain how the Skills Library and Profiling
web service can be used for different purposes by different
users.
The key highlights of the SLP engine are: Provides for mapping
of skills in a standard template that can be used for
different purposes and by everybody
The skills library is quite exhaustive and is dynamically
updated to include moreskills
The SLP engine is a web service that can be used by different
users for differentpurposes
Its Your Skills offers SLP web service to providers of products
and services in the HR tech space as well as users of HR tech in
their companies. The API on the skills library and the plugin on
the skills profiling provides the power and flexibility to develop
skills-centric applications.
Key web links:Its Your Skills www.itsyourskills.com
Skills Profile www.itsyourskills.com/skills-profile
SLP API www.itsyourskills.com/skills-profile-api
We would be happy to discuss your thoughts and ideas on SLP
engine.
Please write to me Ashish Kole, [email protected]
http://www.itsyourskills.commailto:[email protected]
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Copyright 2014, 3D Talent Services
The need for SLPHR is one of the most unstructured domains or
disciplines. Compare this with other disciplines such as finance,
healthcare, materials or retail and we can sense how unstructured
HR is. And this is a problem indeed. For example, resumes are the
most commonly used mechanism for articulation of ones skills
profile. (Note: We use the word skills loosely to include commonly
understood skills, competencies, talent and others.) And everyones
resume is different. Thus an apple to apple comparison is not
possible. People need to read through texts (in an era when minimum
text is the norm) of different resumes to make comparison. Well,
this is one of the limitation. There are several others all of
which will be overcome with SLP as we will see as we go through the
document.
Benefits of standardization and dataficationThis is an era where
many disciplines are immensely benefiting from big data and
analytics. But this is possible only if
we have data in a standardized manner. Unfortunately such
benefit eludes HR space simply because we do not have
standardization nor data.
Datafication and thereon skills analytics will immensely benefit
from the technologies such as big data and analytics. What it will
result in simple empower the individuals to make better choices on
their talent development and engagement. They will be able to make
better choices on what skills to develop and where to deploy them
better. The same is true for companies. Skills analytics will
empower companies better inventory, utilize, deploy and develop
skills within their enterprises.
Oh, btw the focus is on skills in particular and not people in
generalIn HR we talk about engaging people, developing people and
so forth. This people is a generic superset. Medicine focuses on
health of people. Finance focuses on money or people. HR needs to
focus on skills of people. Skills is that
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resource that needs to be harnessed, deployed and developed.
There are three important observations on todays talent
landscape why skills become important factor:
Skills are changing and emerging far more rapidly. Many of
todays hot skills did not exist few years back including those such
as cloud, big data.
Businesses are becoming complex with creation of products and
services needing skills in diverse areas. No wonder a car company
Ford advertises for as many software professionals as do other IT
companies. ***
Employment is passe. What is in is engagement of skills. And
engagement can happen in several ways full time employment,
temping, moonlighting etc. ****
Graduation of HRISHRIS and companies that use HRIS need to
graduate in line with the two
profound changes that we have talked about so far:
Need for focus on skills. Need for developing and deploying them
better.
Need for standardization and datafication of skills to benefit
from big data and analytics to empower individuals and
enterprises.
Most HRIS and users of HRIS focus on information on people other
than pertaining to skills. Information on employee background
information, payroll, attrition, leave, time sheets etc. However,
the focus on skills is at a very rudimentary stage. In most cases
skills are not part of the coverage. And even when they are, it is
mostly on the behavioral side (and mostly called competencies).
There is lot of talk and web space on talent analytics. We find
that mostly they are talking of analytics on employee information
those that we are referring to above. And not on skills.
Skills need to be mapped, measured, inventoried, analysed and
become
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the basis of business decisions. HRIS needs to graduate to
fulfill this need of businesses.
Way forward on skills standardization and dataficationSLP is a
very simple and commonsensical solution. Lets look at the problem
of resumes we discussed above. Instead of different resumes for
different people can we not have a simple standard form in which
everyone maps ones skills. After all of us use such standard forms
for example in entering geographical information in say E Commerce
sites, social profile in social media sites and so on. Yes, a
standard form for skills would be very useful.
People often ask us why that if it is so simple and
commonsensical a solution, no one else has created such a form so
far. The problem is that the skills space is far too complex,
diverse and dynamic unlike geography or social preferences.
This is the problem that Its Your Skills has solved creating
that common
form for all in whichever domain or function or industry one is
in and. And the offering is SLP Skills Library and Profiling
engine
Skills libraryAs the name suggests, the SLP is a library or
taxonomy or lexicon of skills. It covers skills in different
functions or domain or industry. The second aspect is its coverage.
It is holistic and in-depth. The third aspect is that it is
dynamic
We have mapped skills in different industries and functions
(Accounts, Information Technology, Engineering and so on). Thus it
is not a dump of skills (like dictionary being a dump of words) but
is a classified organization of skills (like the organization of
words in say an encyclopedia or books in a library )
The skills library is holistic and in-depth. The skills cover
functional / technical skills as well as behavioral / cognitive
skills. And in functional / technical skills the skills are
organized under sections such as specialization, tools &
technologies one uses, principles & concepts one knows, domains
in which
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one has worked and activities one has performed. And these
skills layer by layer takes a person down to mapping his or her
skill in detail.
Finally, the skills library is dynamic. We constantly update the
skills library with skills thats not been covered so far or that
emerge. We deploy human intelligence and technology to enable this
process of dynamic updation.
Skills profilingSkills profiling is an application or user
interaction layer that sits on top of the library for creating of
skills profile. Imagine this to be a menu card of skills. But a
large complex menu card at the backend. While being simple at the
front end. Without simplicity this will fail.
Also the profiling provides for not just mapping skills but also
for measurement of skills or rather indicating proficiencies in
different skills. This measure of proficiencies can be by self or
by others (peers, interviewers, managers)
Use of Skills Library andProfiling engineThink of the different
use cases as follows:
Creating a skills profile of self for self assessment &
development
Creating skills profile of jobs in lieu of unstructured job
descriptions
Getting skills profiles of applicants to jobs, all in the same
strucutured template
Assessment of proficiencies and capturing of the same in the
skills profile
Inventorying skills in the company and thus planning for develop
or hire decisions
Responding to new business opportunities by bringing diverse
skills together
Helping individuals understand gaps in their skills
Finding right sources for developing gaps in skills
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Giving feedback to employees based on skill gaps
There is a lot that we can do with the SLP engine. We can take
HRIS and talent analytics and make them skills-centric to improve
effectiveness.
SLP for HRIS companies and users of HRISOur idea on SLP is that
we would love to provide to any user who wishes to get on to
becoming skills-centric or provides services in the
talentscape.
Thus we provide SLP as web services. We ourselves use the web
service / API
to create and offer an a SAAS based Enterprise Skills Management
(ESM).
Thus we are not competing with HRIS. We wish to be partners of
HRIS and users of HRIS. We want to build our expertise in skills
analytics and share the same as tools for others to use.
This web service model means you do not have to disrupt any of
your existing platform or applications to offer skills-centric
solutions. You can build applications and take the data on skills
for the SLP including the presentation layer i.e. the profiling
part.
References****
Ford advertises as many jobs in software as many a midsized tech
firm.The
Economisthttp://www.economist.com/news/business/21644150-battle-software-talent-other-industries-can-learn-silicon-valley-how-bag
****
The EconomistIssue: Workers on
Taphttp://www.economist.com/printedition/2015-01-03
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21644150-battle-software-talent-other-industries-can-learn-silicon-valley-how-baghttp://www.economist.com/news/business/21644150-battle-software-talent-other-industries-can-learn-silicon-valley-how-baghttp://www.economist.com/printedition/2015-01-03
