All employee training programs must start with two sets of information – the skills required throughout the organization (by job or position, by location, by department, etc.), and the existing skills of each employee in those jobs and positions. With that information, you can inventory the gaps between the two – i.e., your current skills deficiencies. And, as a more advanced step, you can do the same analysis taking into account ascension planning (i.e., the skills deficiencies for future employee jobs).

PDS’ Vista HCM solution provides tools to help you do the work.

  1. Catalog required skills – Starting with recruiting and continuing through day-to-day HR management, Vista supports identifying and assigning skills, degrees, licenses, etc. that are required for employees. These can be tied to specific jobs or positions, to organizations or departments, to individual locations, to teams, and even company-wide. Once in place, the qualifications necessary for an employee to do his job are the sum of all qualifications across all organizational dimensions.
  2. Inventory existing skills – Vista provides robust mechanisms for inventorying skills by employee. Whether these are determined by questionnaires, management performance reviews, tests, or other means, all skills, degrees, licenses, completed courses, etc. can be associated with employees and validated as such.
  3. Analyze gaps – As long as the skills required of the position and the employees skills are maintained, you can then move on to the next step – analyzing the gaps between the two –  if you manage succession plans then you can inventory those gaps as well. With Vista, this is accomplished within the Learning Plans module.
  4. Develop targeted courses – Vista can automatically create learning plans for employees by comparing their existing qualifications against their required ones and then finding courses that target the missing qualifications. The first step in this process – the inventorying of the gaps – can be run stand-alone. If you run this process company-wide (or for any segment of your company), you can then get the list of all met and unmet employee qualifications. Simple tabulations of the list will tell you the areas in which you need to target training. (You might also want to drill down to the involved individuals to start some initial communications.)
  5. Manage Learning Plans – Once your organizational skill deficiencies are inventoried (or re-inventoried), you can then make sure you have the requisite courses available – and use Vista to generate and manage employee learning plans using those courses.
  6. Analyze Results – Finally, you can use Vista Analytics to measure the adoption and success of your training initiatives.

Note: as with anything else that returns high value, this process requires effort. If you don’t do a thorough job of identifying all of your organization’s required skills and then cataloging all of your employees’ existing skills, you won’t be able to use Vista to its fullest to help you develop and implement employee learning and growth plans. There’s no better time to start than today!

*Analytic included in Vista 7.0.2 release

Marco Padovani
Senior Development Manager
mpadovani@pdssoftware.com