The best managers know their employees. They watch them closely to understand their unique skills and the projects that drive them. Then they capitalise on those qualities to encourage their employees’ best performance for the team.
In a busy office environment, it can be hard to catch the nuance of your staff’s skills and strengths and how they overlap and support one another.
Employee profiles can help you identify employees’ strengths and weaknesses, building better, more efficient teams that work more effectively together.
You can build employee profiles in a learning management system (LMS) like LearnRight (more about that later). First, let’s understand how employee skills profiles benefit your teams and company.
What is an employee skills profile?
An employee skills profile is a report of each employee’s work history, current roles and responsibilities, education, performance history, strengths & weaknesses, and social reputation around the office.
In short, it’s an exhaustive compilation of the tasks, achievements, failures, and job functions that have set them on their current career trajectory.
Companies can compile much of the information required from an employee’s HR file, but it’s also a good idea to interview each employee’s manager and coworkers, as well as the employee.
That way, you get a 360 view of every employee’s competencies and the unique value they provide to your company.
Offer more personalised development plans
When you build an employee profile, you look at your employee’s past roles and responsibilities, job experience in prior roles, and performance in their current position.
That information, compiled in a concise, easy-to-read report, helps you understand an employee’s career path to date and plan for their future career trajectory.
It’s an essential exercise for your company as it helps you see how to develop each employee into a productive team member who is engaged and challenged in their role.
You get a report of their skills baseline, and you understand how to nurture those skills into more substantial competencies and career growth.
A targeted approach to assigning tasks
While intuition will always have a role to play in developing teams, creating profiles for your employees offers an unambiguous tool for assigning the right task to the right staff member.
An employee profile lets you see which employees already possess the expertise you need for specific roles. It takes the guesswork out of deciding who will thrive in particular assignments.
When employees are given tasks that suit their skills, they’re more confident and productive in their roles, so they work harder for your company and produce higher yields.
Tailor employee feedback
Employee profiles can also help you provide candid, tailored feedback that is more likely to be constructive.
When you understand an employee’s strengths and weaknesses, you can give them feedback on their performance that plays to those strengths. When you know their employment background and job experience, you can be sure that you’re not offering repetitive information or counterproductive criticism.
A deeper understanding of your employee creates a deeper employee/company relationship. Employees will feel that their contributions to your team are seen and appreciated and will be more open to receiving feedback when it is tailored to reflect their unique role in your company.
Understand work styles
A thorough employee skills profile will also note each employee’s work styles and learning preferences.
That way, you can ensure that your employees get the training they need, presented in a way that will help them retain it best.
You’ll also know how your employees work best – through incentivisation, goal-setting, or performance reviews – so you can get the most out of your team in a process that motivates and inspires them to perform.
Identify knowledge gaps
Even the most talented employee has gaps in their training or skills that may be holding them back from excelling in their role.
An employee profile helps you identify those gaps more clearly and make a plan for resolving them.
Employees may simply require a refresh of staff training courses or to revisit product tutorials for a product they don’t use regularly.
You may even identify employees who show leadership potential but need to improve their knowledge in a few key areas.
Identifying knowledge gaps helps you understand whether you can achieve your company’s goals with your current team or if you’ll need to think about hiring from outside the company.
Build teams more effectively
Armed with detailed information about your employee’s strengths, skills, and work history, you can start to build highly-effective teams with ease.
Employee profiles show you how your employees’ skills overlap, so you can avoid placing staff with identical skills profiles on the same projects.
You can also see which employees have competencies that support one another, making teams more dynamic and productive.
Build employee skills profiles in an LMS
A good LMS, like LearnRight, helps you build helpful, easy-to-read employee skills profiles.
You can pull information on each employee from training and education they’ve completed in the LMS in the past to see how they performed in tests and quizzes. And you can add relevant HR information to their profiles with a straightforward uploading process.
You can also keep your employee profiles up to date in the LMS, so it’s easy to review them regularly, knowing all the information you need is consistently available in one place.
You can explore how our LMS builds company profiles with a free demo of LearnRight. Talk to one of our specialists today, and we’ll help you envision a leaner, more productive team informed by LMS-generated employee skills profiles.
