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Mark Homer: Mark Homer is Director of John Matchett Ltd, a software and training company based in Banbury, UK.
Skills management"If you're managing your skills, you're managing your business."
A recent news item tells us that the UK is having to recruit IT experts from India because we do not have the necessary skills ourselves. If UK companies had adopted well-thought out skills management systems, we would not have had to resort to this drastic solution.
This is a true story: a consultant worked for a worldwide IT consulting firm (one of the "big six") as a team leader for three years. He had programming and management experience in the HR area. He had a good background in PeopleSoft. When the project ended the consultant expected to be snapped up quickly as his skills were very marketable.
He had to wait for six months before he found a project, for which he was ideally suited. However, he discovered that the same project had been looking for someone for six months!This meant that the project was already six months late, and the consultant had already been six months not earning revenue. The project finished six months late, and the consulting firm had to pay a fee to the client to compensate for the missed deadline.
If the company had used a competency management system, the consultant could have been found in 20 minutes, not six months.
People skills are probably the most important foundation for a company because they impact on every aspect of corporate process and, ultimately, profit. Ask yourself this question: what skills do you have that your current employer is not aware of? What skills do your colleagues have that their employers have never asked them about?
It happens too often that an individual will apply for a job and send in his CV. This CV is then filed away and never looked at again while that individual works for the company.
This results in classic situations where that same individual might complain that he was never considered for a particular promotion or different job within that same company because the employer is simply not aware of the additional skills he has. Most people come to a new job with portable skills (e.g....