Skill Development, DevOps and Digital Transformation

Designing New Approaches for Driving Competency Empowerment

The New Year often signifies the desire for new skills and assessing the talent within your organization. The big question for any business is: How do you successfully and quickly train or upskill staff and teams to tackle the digital challenges that lie ahead?

With the speed of changes in the modern workplace and the never-ending introduction of new technology, it can be difficult to work out where to start and what you need to implement in a strategic plan which aligns itself with your business needs.

A lack of skills, training and investment can cause resentment in staff, alongside poor service delivery, customer frustration, loss of reputation and ultimately, if not dealt with, business failure.

What does good look like?

Before your organization can move forward with any plans, you need to first identify the issues that you face and what expectation you have from your team about the part they play in delivering the best experience to your consumer.

What does good actually look like in the roles within your organization? What are the key competencies you expect and need, for that job title, to deliver “good” to your customer?

Without knowing the answer to these questions you have no benchmark to assess against, no target for overall improvement and staff have no clear guidelines of your expectation of them.

An interesting case study about evaluating and improving staff skills in a large organization appears in the new VeriSM™ book. This is an overview of how one large insurance provider handled this scenario.

Case Study featuring EXIN’s e-CF® Next Solutions

One of the biggest challenges facing such a large organization was bringing into focus the skills the company had in-house. With key technology changes it became apparent that there was an IT skills gap within the workforce, but with such a large group of staff encompassing so many roles how could it be accurately measured to allow a personal development plan to be implemented which was tailored to the individual needs of that employee?

EXIN was founded in 1984 and has over 30 years’ experience in the field of developing exams, accrediting partners and have certified over 2 million professionals worldwide. They offer exams and e-competence assessment in over 165 countries and 20 languages.

The Importance of a Competency Framework

EXIN provided consistent e-competences outlines, based on the e-competence framework which is recognized globally and uses an overview of 40 key IT skills, to profile more than 40 roles by using the EXIN e-CF® NEXT Role Profiler within their organization.

Once the exercise was done for these roles the process was repeated to allow for future trends and changes by testing and creating potential scenarios.

Empowering Employees through Self Discovery

The task was encouraged on a voluntary basis with management being some of the first to complete, so leading by example and highlighting the benefits of participating. The reasons for the changes and its effectiveness in helping move the business was clearly marketed to employees to create buy-in.

Staff created their own online e-CF® NEXT Profile through questionnaires which encouraged them to be open about their experiences with IT and operational tasks. Subsequently, they received their own personal profile report with strengths and areas for development.

Making use of the Skills Gap Analysis

Organizational skills gap analysis took place from collating and reviewing the data to identify an overall view of the organization. Over 100 teams, divisions, and roles were analyzed in this way allowing for alignment of staff education and training.*

Analyzing skills in this way allowed for future proofing staff, training and the needs of all stakeholders whilst promoting the ethos in the organization of lifelong learning.

The Relevancy of VeriSM™

The VeriSM™ ethos centers on achieving the best outcome for all stakeholders, and the notion that we are all service providers. An aspiration that is woven through the fabric of the first publication.

Service management for the digital age understands that there is a strong need for a varied approach, and this is one of the many factors that compelled EXIN to be involved. VeriSM™ allows a flexible tailored route to utilizing service management best practice into an organization and is a natural fit to the other products in the EXIN portfolio.

Community as the backbone of VeriSM™

There has been a phenomenal global interest since it launched late last year as its content echoes with businesses and individuals across many industries including those outside of traditional IT enterprises. The unique collaboration of over 50 industry experts from education to IT, software to service desk allows many different perspectives and experiences to be shared in an inclusive project which opens up the benefit of service management to a wider audience than ever before.

For more information about VeriSM™ and EXIN visit the website.

*More information on this project can be found in ‘VeriSM™ – A service management approach for the digital age’ in the section on people, roles, competencies, and teams.