Gone are the days when completing a university degree meant acquiring all the skills you would need for the following thirty years of work. Gone too is the idea that holding a qualification is all that matters. Today’s world wants skills and it recognises that skills come from all sources and in people from all walks of life. Whether they come from formal education, learning on-the–job, or trying something new at home, skills have become the currency of employability, career-growth, and productivity. The trouble is that the skills we have and use on a day-to-day basis aren’t always so easy to pin down. That’s where skills recognition and skills visibility come in: recognising the skills we have wherever and however we got them and making them visible to ourselves and others.
What is skills recognition?
In simple terms, skills recognition means looking at what a person does (or has done) and identifying what skills they possess to make it happen. Put a little more comprehensively, skills recognition refers to the process of identifying, validating, and formally acknowledging an individual’s knowledge and abilities regardless of how or where they were acquired.
- Identifying skills – is figuring out what specific skills a person has based on the evidence, be that a university transcript, a resume, self-reflection, or the word of their peers. The more granular the identified skills are, the more useful they are.
- Validating skills – is confirming that an individual’s identified skills meet certain standards or requirements, ensuring that their skills are up to scratch, compliant, and more than a line on a resume. Quality matters.
- Acknowledging skills – formally recognising and giving credit to an individual’s abilities, whether through official certifications, workplace recognition or informal acknowledgment from their peers or supervisors.
As with most things in life, all this can be easier said than done. Think about the ways we have historically gone about deciding whether a person can do the job we need them to do. We might look through their qualifications or read over the responsibilities and achievements written up on their CV. We might ask leading questions in an interview or ask candidates to undertake cognitive assessments. Or we might hire somebody internally based on what we know about them already.
As it happens, all of these traditional methods have their limitations, meaning that skills recognition done properly needs something extra.
What is skills visibility?
Skills recognition is no walk in the park, so it is extra important to make the skills we know that we have stand out. Skills visibility is just that, making sure our abilities are easily or automatically communicated to our peers, our organisation, and our future employers so that they know how we can best meet their needs (and we can get the job).
But skills visibility goes beyond the individual. It is also extremely important for business. If employers are to respond to the ever-changing demands of business and new technology, they need to be able to allocate their resources quickly and effectively. In this context, skills visibility means knowing what skills an organisation has on hand at any moment, getting the right person to the right place at the right time.
Why are skills recognition and skills visibility important?
The economy is on the move, jobs are in flux and job roles are changing more rapidly than ever before. The tried-and-tested resume is showing its age and individuals looking for new opportunities are having to rethink how they put their best foot forward. As industries become wired to skills, recognising the skills you have and making those skills as visible as possible is crucial to success in career advancement. This means bringing more than your work experience to the table. Recognising that the time you spent last summer organising that renovation required project management skills, or that the stint you did as a delivery driver honed your customer management skills, is an important step to getting ahead and not relying only on formal qualifications to do the talking. Making those skills visible and noticeable is equally important – and that goes for business and industry as well.
- Workers – recognising the skills that would otherwise remain implicit in your work or on your CV opens doors, whether you’re moving up in your current role or exploring new industries. Making your skills visible ensures that employers and industry leaders notice your talents. Skills recognition and visibility boost professional credibility, help you stand out, and open up lateral opportunities that you would miss following a traditional career path.
- Educators – skills recognition and visibility are crucial in shaping student success and aligning education with industry needs. By formally recognising the skills students acquire both inside and outside the classroom, educators validate their readiness for the workforce, helping bridge the gap between academic learning and real-world application, and in doing so, enhancing the reputation and relevance of their educational programs.
- Employers – recognising employees’ skills whatever their source and not getting stuck on their CV is critical to understanding what your workforce is capable of. Skills visibility ensures workers’ skills are easily seen, helping employers make informed decisions about hiring, development, and building their organisations into the future. Skills are the cornerstone of any organisation. Recognising those skills and making them visible is the work of the stonesmith that makes the right skills available when they’re needed.
- Industry – A thriving economy requires a dynamic and competitive workforce. Recognised and visible skills enable industry to meet demand, fill skill gaps, and engineer a more efficient labour market. Agile skills lead to greater productivity and innovation, more seamless collaboration and the labour mobility that is a hallmark of economic growth.
When done right, skills recognition and skills visibility also has the power to overcome one of the core disconnects hidden in the relationship between workers and employers.
Something which is only just crystallising for many employers is that while their businesses have sets of tasks that need completing, their workers’ potential is not measured in tasks but in the skills they use to complete them.
There’s a disconnect between skills and tasks that needs to be overcome if we are to move into the future of work.
Individuals have more than one or even a set of skills. They have scores, even hundreds, of skills that are adaptable to the contexts in which tasks “live”. The same task in a different context may need a different suite of skills than another task, slightly tweaked.
Because skills and tasks aren’t equivalent to each other, it is important to recognise workers’ skills down to a granular level – so you know exactly the worker to assign to a job that needs doing, so you know precisely what training will enhance a team’s capabilities, so you know just which candidate to hire.
Skills recognition and skills visibility are essential to businesses that want to build expertise in their workforce by matching the right skills to the right task in the right context.
What impact does skills recognition and visibility have?
The impact of skills recognition and skills visibility stretches across every aspect of the economy, from the person looking for a job or the training centre preparing students for the workforce to employers looking to recruit the best talent or to allocate their resources in the most promising ways. And it doesn’t stop there. Recognising skills and making them readily visible and available is the key to lifting the productivity of industry as a whole.
The following are just a few of the impacts delivered by effective skills recognition and skills visibility:
Impact on business
Organisational resilience
Skills are dynamic, meaning that organisations must continually work hard to get a clear and current picture of the skill sets they have on hand to meet their organisational goals. Keeping track of skills via proxy indicators such as resumes and qualifications is a losing battle in today’s fast-paced business landscape. Achieving skills visibility in an organisation circumvents this ponderous process and lays the groundwork for identifying and bridging the skills gaps that can hinder any enterprise looking to move into the future. It enables upskilling and reskilling initiatives, facilitates strategic workforce development, and boosts company morale by showing employees that their employers know what they can do and are ready to reward them for it.
By building skills visibility within their organisations, businesses gain a clear view of their employees’ skills and how they fit with business objectives, allowing employers to manage their workforce strategically by assigning the right people to the right tasks, identifying emerging leaders, and making smarter hiring choices. All this comes together to reduce turnover, lower recruitment costs, and allocate resources more efficiently, leading to higher morale, increased efficiency and greater profitability. The result is a resilient – and thriving – ecosystem built for adaptability and sustained success in times of uncertainty.
Employee morale and retention
Knowing that your employer values you and recognises what you bring to the organisation is an important component of wellbeing at work. As millennials form the majority of the workforce and Gen Z begin to enter it for the first time, the generational shift brings with it fresh ideas of what matters in the world of work. Those traditional levers, perks and compensation, have lost their shine. In their place is the demand of many millennial and Gen Z workers that the organisation to which they are committed be equally committed to them as individuals. This commitment can take many forms, but a commitment to their progression and their future stands above the rest.
Successful organisations have recognised this by moving beyond the traditional annual performance reviews to strategies that regularly evaluate how their employees’ skills align with the organisation’s business strategy.
At Renault, this has resulted in internal mobility increasing by 60 per cent. That means skilled workers are remaining in the business and not leaving for greener pastures elsewhere as well as setting aspirational examples for other employees.
Skills recognition and skills visibility at a more integral level has the capacity to significantly boost morale by showing employees that their employer is taking them and their skills seriously by investing in them.
Agile business
Skills visibility within an organisation significantly enhances its ability to respond to change by allowing businesses to quickly find the best people to take advantage of new opportunities. Businesses looking to dip their toes into data analytics, for example, can identify employees with data skills that are working in other fields, redeploying them and utilising their skills without having to go through protracted and costly recruitment processes.
Along the same line of thinking is skills recognition’s benefit to resource flexibility. By having a catalogue of their employees’ skills on hand, employers are able to quickly form dynamic teams by drawing from multiple departments to address specific business challenges as they emerge. Skills recognition means quick thinking – and acting – is de rigueur, alleviating bottlenecks, proactively bridging skills gaps, and cutting down time-to-market.
Recognising employees’ skills also empowers teams to make autonomous decisions, a hallmark of agile businesses. With clear visibility into their team’s capabilities, managers can delegate authority to employees to act independently, trusting their skills without needing the go-ahead from higher-ups, with the rewards to business starting from more innovation, higher morale, and a more agile business. Visible skills means teams can take ownership of tasks, make informed decisions, and drive projects forward without constant oversight.
Inclusivity
When an organisation orients itself to skills instead of resumes, individuals from underrepresented groups have a chance to shine. People from disadvantaged backgrounds may not have had the chance to go to a privileged university or may have had to gain their skills in unorthodox ways. But their skills are just as good as anybody else’s. In environments where promotions or opportunities are based on clear, objective skill recognition, there is less reliance on subjective factors, such as networking or office visibility. This fosters a more equitable work environment where skills are the primary currency of advancement.
Targeted training
When employers know the skills their employees have, whether from work, study or life experience, employers are primed to cut training costs and boost their workforce’s skills at the same time. Instead of re-teaching skilled workers skills they already have, organisations with skills recognition in place can fill in the skill gaps they don’t, allowing for targeted, efficient training strategies that enable workers to get back to the matter at hand as quickly as possible.
Impact on individuals
Career growth
For individuals, formally recognising their skills and making them visible greatly enhances their likelihood to be considered for promotion, to lead new projects, or find new roles in areas they might not have previously thought of on the basis of their degree alone. Skills recognition and visibility provides clear, tangible proof of what an employer can rely on a candidate for, signalling expertise and readiness for advancement and new responsibilities.
Self-confidence
It is all too easy to overlook the skills you yourself possess or to underestimate the amount you have learned through study, work or play. Receiving formal acknowledgment that your life experiences have equipped you with a wealth of skills – skills that other people and employers recognise and value – can bring personal satisfaction and confidence to individuals who mistakenly thought otherwise. With renewed self-confidence, individuals are set to navigate their career with greater assurance, tackle new challenges with resilience, and actively contribute to their professional environment.
Networking and collaboration
Visible skills lead to greater opportunities. Colleagues or industry professionals are more likely to approach recognised experts for advice, mentorship, or joint projects, helping individuals build valuable relationships and further solidify their reputation as skilled professionals.
Getting your foot in the door
While having a degree is still seen as important, recruiters have started to buck the trend, with two thirds of hiring managers focusing on hiring candidates based on skills rather than qualifications or even experience. When skills are king, making your skills as visible as possible in a trusted and verifiable way is the key to getting your foot in the door and landing your first job or your first role in a new industry.
Personal development
When skills are tracked and recognised, individuals can clearly see the skills they stand to develop further and the areas where they can break new ground. Armed with this knowledge, individuals are better able to set goals for their career and spend their time right.
Impact on educators
Aligning with Industry
When skills are visible, skills gaps are too. With skills recognition and visibility initiatives in place, educational institutions and training providers are well-placed to target those skills that industry need and that are most likely to help their students gain employment. When industry can transparently signal the skills it needs, educators can adapt their curriculums to respond to today’s rapid rate of change more quickly than ever before.
Boosting enrolments
While having a degree is still seen as important, recruiters have started to buck the trend, with two thirds of hiring managers focusing on hiring candidates based on skills rather than qualifications or even experience. When your skills are presented in as visible a way as possible and can be trusted and verified, it’s an easier way of getting your foot in the door and can lead to your first job or first job in a different industry.
Impact on industry
Addressing skill shortages
Skill shortages are rife across Australia’s industries and other developed economies, with 36 percent of occupations in Australia needing more skills in play. These shortages have been increasing even as enrolments in educational institutions have been going up, meaning that relying on universities and training providers to solve the problem is not going to work. But effective skills recognition systems – especially when applied at scale – can. People gain skills from all sources, including non-formal training at the workplace and informal learning at home on hobbies or from following personal interests. There is a huge pool of skills out there ready to be recognised; and when those skills are made visible, they can be employed in those roles that need them most.
Skills recognition has the added advantage over formal education in its speed, to mention nothing about cost. A typical degree takes about three years to complete, a certificate one to two years, but much of what a person learns through these means will not be relevant for a job they have in mind. For somebody who has the skills already but needs a certificate to get through the door or who wants to pick up just the skill they need without going through a long and expensive process, skills recognition systems offer an efficient alternative. When you add thousands of these individuals together, you get a fast and effective means to direct skills to the industries that need them.
How can we make skills recognition and visibility happen?
The benefits of skills recognition and skills visibility for individuals, educators, employers and for the economy as a whole are all too clear. But as with any new concept, it can be difficult to know how to translate ideas into action and how to capitalise on the new knowledge you have gained. In order not to get left behind, or better, to get ahead of the curve and implement skills recognition and visibility for yourself or your organisations, it is worth acting quickly.
Luckily, skills recognition is a well-trodden path and there are many analogue and digital solutions ready to unlock individuals’ and organisations’ potential. Below are just some of them.
Analogue strategies
Skills are as old as people are, so it stands to reason that skills recognition and skills visibility strategies have been around a lot longer than the modern computer. From the time workers have sought employment at a farm or in a household, they have needed to make their skills visible and their employers have had to recognise what they can do. Luckily, strategies have developed a bit since then, Here are a few:
- Create a skills inventory – For organisations, this involves two main steps: collecting the data and organising it. Data collection is possible through rolling out existing assessment tools or building your own and can include cognitive tests, self-assessment, or evaluation by peers. Once you have the data, organising it in a systematic and structured way is crucial, separating durable skills and technical skills and optimising the inventory structure for organisational needs.
- Encourage self-assessment – a simple, cost-effective, and customisable tool that encourages participation and accountability and that can be combined with peer assessment to reduce bias and foster a culture of continuous learning.
- Mentorship programs – where experienced employees can guide others can help to recognise and showcase skills that mentees may possess without being fully aware of it or having developed fully.
- Foster a culture of learning – and continuous skill development as part of the company culture. When employees feel supported in developing their skills, they are more likely to share and recognise them.
Digital strategies
Pen and paper have served modern societies exceedingly well, but their time is drawing to a close. So have manual methods for skills recognition and skills visibility. With advances in technology, it has become far simpler and quicker to manage digital skills inventories and make skills visible across an organisation using digital tools. This saves money, boosts accessibility, and gets the word out farther and at a more rapid pace.
- Skills management platforms – allow employees to create customisable profiles that showcase their skills, qualifications, and accomplishments, all the while making their skills shareable and ready for endorsement and assessment.
- Learning management systems – can be used by employers to track the training of their staff as well as to prod them to learn new skills connected with what they already know. Learning management systems allow employers to get a simple snapshot of what their workers are capable of.
- Digital portfolios – encourage people to build shareable collections of the projects they have completed, the skills they have acquired, and the experience that have led them to where they are, all ready to be posted on social media or linked to a resume.
- Analytics and reporting – is an increasingly popular addition to the HR processes of many large organisations that want to keep track of who is who and what they can do. By breaking down job roles into tasks and analysing an organisation’s roles against the tasks being completed, employers are well set to identify skills gaps and highlight areas of expertise.
AI Strategies
Of course, the elephant in the room is AI; and it is one mighty elephant. While the AI-mania heralded by ChatGPT is cooling down, useful and level-headed products have emerged to make recognising skills easier than ever. Natural language processing tools such as GPT-4 and Microsoft Co-pilot have been harnessed to read and produce resumes, infer the skills needed for job roles, dynamically manage workforces, and recognise prior learning. AI makes a lot possible that was not possible (or at least, unrealistically laborious) before:
- Skills mapping – algorithms can use natural language processing to analyse job descriptions, resumes, and employee profiles to map their skills against the needs of their organisation or custom skills taxonomies. This can involve recognising the skills implicit in their resumes too. Automating the skills recognition process with AI skills mapping is a powerful tool for identifying skills gaps.
- Skills intelligence – AI can be used to transform real-time skills data into personalised learning recommendations, helping individuals continue their journey of lifelong learning in the direction from which they and their employer can best benefit. Integrating skills data with performance analytics, employers can plan the future of their workforce, align their teams, and understand what projects they can take on.
- Dynamic skills wallets – are more than a collection of digital qualifications, they are an always up-to-date detailed catalogue of all the skills a person has, updated every time that person finishes a task, completed a training session, or learns a skill out in the world. With dynamic portfolios on hand, individuals are able to share their “skillshot” (their skills snapshot) to potential employers and to make their skills more visible and current than ever before.
- Predictive workforce planning – is made possible by AI-powered analysis of an organisation’s skills data, enabling them to identify and forecast present and future skills needs. This helps businesses look for the right talent at the right time, adjusting business goals based on the workforce they have on hand and the talent available on the market.
SkillsAware as the future of skills recognition and skills visibility
SkillsAware is an AI-powered skills recognition engine that captures and maintains an evidence-based indicator of the plethora of skills that people accumulate over their lives, be it from formal qualifications, non-formal training at work, or informal experience doing what they love. SkillsAware is designed to enable organisations to identify the skill sets their workers possess, to highlight their strengths, and identify any gaps so that they can plan for the future. And unlike any other skills recognition platform out there, its recognition capabilities are founded on the depth and rigour of the Australian training system.
SkillsAware has a host of features that make skills recognition and visibility an easy, reliable, and powerful addition to any business. Here are just a few:
- Intuitive interface – SkillsAware makes getting your workers’ skills recognised easy by leading them through the process step by step in conversation with a generative AI assistant or Skills Awareness Data Index Engine. SkillsAware helps users identify the skills they have and prompts them to provide the evidence needed to ensure employers can be confident in their abilities.
- Recognise all forms of learning – SkillsAware isn’t just interested in seeing qualifications. It can help recognise the skills your workers have gained from all parts of their life by giving your employees credit based on what they assert, what you or their peers can vouch for, and what certifiers can guarantee.
- Skills warehouse – SkillsAware is a warehouse for your organisation’s skills and the evidence your workers bring to the table. When you click on a worker’s skills, you’ll be able to see all the evidence they have for what they can do. For individuals, this means they can share this information with managers or potential employers with confidence.
- Rigorous skills framework – SkillsAware issues its skills indicator based on Rich Skills Descriptors (RSDs) mapped to Units of Competency in the Australian training system. This means that employers can trust that the skills recognised by SkillsAware aren’t just “thought up” but are grounded in the ongoing collaboration between educators and industry.
If skills recognition and visibility is important to you or your organisations – and it should be – SkillsAware is your best port of call. Contact us today to discover more about SkillsAware and what it can do for your business or industry.
FAQs
What is skills recognition?
Skills recognition is the process of identifying, validating, and acknowledging an individual’s skills and knowledge, regardless of how they were acquired. This involves pinpointing specific skills, verifying their quality against standards, and formally recognising them. Traditional methods like resumes and interviews have limitations, necessitating additional approaches for effective skills recognition.
What is skills visibility?
Skills visibility is about making one’s abilities easily known to peers, organisations, and potential employers. It’s crucial for individuals to showcase their skills and for businesses to efficiently allocate resources by knowing the skills available within their workforce.
Why are skills recognition and skills visibility important?
Skills recognition and visibility are important in today’s rapidly evolving job market because they highlight the need for individuals to showcase their skills beyond formal qualifications and for businesses to effectively identify and leverage their workforce’s skills. This approach benefits workers, educators, employers, and industry as a whole, leading to increased agility, inclusivity, and economic growth.
What impact does skills recognition and visibility have?
Skills recognition and visibility have significant impacts on businesses, individuals, educators, and industry. For businesses, it leads to organisational resilience, improved employee morale and retention, agility, inclusivity, and targeted training. Employees benefit from enhanced career growth, self-confidence, networking opportunities, easier job entry, and focused personal development. Educators can better align with industry needs and attract more students. Overall, the industry experiences a reduction in skill shortages and a more efficient labor market.
How can we make skills recognition and visibility happen?
Strategies for implementing skills recognition and visibility include both analogue and digital approaches. Analogue strategies include creating skills inventories, encouraging self-assessment, mentorship programs, and fostering a culture of learning. Digital strategies involve skills management platforms, learning management systems, digital portfolios, and analytics and reporting. Additionally, AI has the potential to play a big role in skills mapping, skills intelligence, dynamic skills wallets, and predictive workforce planning.
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About our partner
SkillsAware
SkillsAware is the foundational skills infrastructure layer that solves the visibility crisis in the modern workforce by making 100% of human capability auditable and actionable.It reveals the hidden talent legacy systems miss, providing a verified record of capability that allows organisations to deploy people with precision while giving individuals a portable Skills IQ to validate their true worth.We empower your current systems with evidence-based visibility into real-world capabilityUsing AI, SkillsAware captures evidence of people’s life-wide skills and issues a shareable skills reportThis isn’t a resume; it’s an auditable profile that provides a probability score of what an individual can actually doProblems We SolveThe cost of recognition - Manual RPL is slow and prohibitively expensive. We use AI to automate evidence collection and mapping, reducing assessment time from days to hours.Hidden talent - Systems only see the last job title, leaving 80% of skills undiscovered. Our guided AI conversation uncovers and catalogues a lifetime of diverse, life-wide capabilitiesWasted training - Employees complete redundant training because existing skills are invisible. We can identify existing capabilities so organisations can target specific gaps saving time and money.Skills-shortage gap - 87% of executives lack data to know if needed skills already exist internally. We surface hidden talent by mapping all individual evidence against industry or corporate standards.Inclusion barriers - Traditional hiring relies on biased proxies like qualifications or previous roles. We level the field by focusing purely on evidence of what a person can actually do.Crisis mobilisation - Agencies cannot rapidly verify skills of available volunteers during disasters. We provide a rapid method to deply the right people to the right roles.Learn more at skillsaware.com
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