Ben Kernick
This blog follows on from my first blog: The value of KnowledgeSmart, where I explained: Why skills assessment is so important, why you should provide focus to your employees and introduced KnowledgeSmart the skills assessment and survey tool, specifically designed for the construction industry.
I also introduced the three important strategic questions:
In this blog, I will focus on Where are we now?
It has been said many times that employees are an organisations biggest asset. They’re the face of the organisation and interact with customers by providing a skilled service. But quite often, organisations are in the dark about their employee’s skills.
I’ve worked with numerous customers who have identified that some members of their team may not have all the skills they need to do their job, and they quite often ask their colleagues for help. Asking for help is not a problem, however this can be distracting and time consuming when it occurs on a continuous basis. This shows that training is needed.
However, it’s not about putting all of your employees on a training course or two. It’s about identifying their skills gaps and helping them to close them in a nurturing environment. At Symetri, we call this Organisational Development.
To begin your organisational development journey, a supportive and development culture needs to be established. This needs to come from the top and enforced from the top down. If management shows an interest in their employee’s development, it goes a long way with your employees. But how do you know what they need to learn?
A skills assessment is a great way to identify gaps and helps suggest a training plan. Knowledge isn’t something that’s learnt once, and you never need to train again. Training is a continuous process, therefore platforms like KnowledgeSmart can continuously evaluate the gaps as you go along.
KnowledgeSmart helps you understand how knowledgeable each individual employee is using particular software and the amount of experience they have. This knowledge then helps you to manage resources for projects more effectively, establish how effective current training programs are within your organisation, and helps you provide a tailored training program for each individual to bring everyone’s skills in line. This isn’t just great for the organisation to provide consistencies for projects, it guarantees a higher quality of project output, improves skills across the board, and ensures a more motivated team.
You don’t just establish what skills your employee’s have, you’re able to benchmark them against each other and across the industry. By highlighting your current strengths and weaknesses, you’re able to make strategic decisions in moving your organisation in the direction you want it.
My next blog will focus on: Where do we want to be?
But in the meantime, if you would like to find out more about KnowledgeSmart, get in touch with us.
