Focusing on Employee Development with Skills Assessment and Mapping

Company Profile
A respected, nationally recognized Minneapolis retail catalog business is taking steps to achieve one of their five mission-critical corporate goals: employee development. They’re a leading database marketing company selling a broad range of products and services direct-to-the-consumer through catalogs, direct marketing and the Internet. The CIO wanted his department set to run at peak efficiency in building a higher utilization.

Because of increased staffing expectations, business needs and a desire to create growth opportunities in the company, the decision was made to focus on employee development. Thorough an analysis of the skills and skill levels of their IT staff and an inventory of the tools they used, they could help manage employee development in a more targeted, efficient manner.

Business Solution
How did they do it? By working with their SMART team.

They had begun an effort to assess their current IT staff skill levels about six months before SMART was introduced. The effort focused on collecting data to outline the company’s specific roles and responsibilities, coupled with the skills needed to support their IT business. After the data was collected, their challenge was to enter it into a software tool that allowed employees and managers to conduct education planning, registration tasks and manage employee education efforts. The SMART tool was exactly what they needed to bring them to the next level of identifying skills, gaps and development opportunities in their organization.

The SMART team surveyed managers and key staff members to understand the initiatives currently underway to assess skill levels and job roles within their organization.

The SMART tool was then used to logically disseminate the information and to build a dynamic repository of data to be used to understand business roles and people and their technical skills and skill levels.

Success
As a result of using our SMART tool, this company achieved the following goals:

• An increased staff retention and job satisfaction levels
• Searchable skills mapped appropriately to organizational roles and projects
• Staffing decisions made easier with accurate job role and staff skill information
• Career options, job descriptions and advancement requirements identified and quantified
• Risks associated with unprepared staff members and current/future projects and required skills identified

Contact US today to see how we can help your organization capitalize on staff skills.