Steve Venokur – Skills management: making sure employees have the knowledge and expertise needed to support your business

Steve

Hi, this is Steve Hunt with People Performance Radio. This week we spoke with Steve Venokur, who’s a Managing Partner from People Sciences, and People Sciences specializes in something called “skills management”, which really is a complement to competency management, where if competencies are how you perform in the job, skills have to do with, do you know what you need to know from a really hard sense, like do you have the engineering skills or the management skills, the technical knowledge required to perform the job at all, whereas competencies influence how you display that knowledge once you’re on the job, and skills, although they’re really critical for perfoming the job, surprinsingly companies tend to take a very informal approach to skills management, understating what their employees actually know, and Steve, who’s been working in this area for 20 years, shares some very interesting things about what makes skills management effective, why companies struggle with it, and the value of it, and I think if this labor shortage continues around skills, which is true, despite the recession there’s still a considerable shortage of people with specialized skills, you’re going to see more and more focus on companies and the need to really get good at skills management, so here’s a chance to learn from one of the few people out there who really is an expert in skills management, so let’s listen to Steve Venokur from People Sciences. Thank you.

Hi, this is Steve Hunt, you’re here with People Performance Radio, and today we’re talking to Steve Venokur, who’s a Managing Partner of People Sciences, which is a company that specializes in skills management, and has been doing it for over 20 years, so first Steve, welcome to the program.

Steve V

Thank you.

Steve

So Steve, can you tell us a little bit about what skills management is?

Steve V

Well, skills management is basically the identification and tracking of skills and strengths and knowledge that the people have in an organization. It’s also used to establish the basis for career development, training, succession planning, performance management and things like that, so essentially it’s a skills based approach to managing an organization.

Steve

What exactly is a skill, I mean a lot of people use these terms ‘skills’ and ‘competencies’ and throw them around in terms of attributes people have – how do define skill?

Steve V

Well that’s an interesting question, because everybody asks that, and essentially a skill is basically the ability to apply a learned function, a process, a tool, it’s expertize and proficiency relating to a specific area of knowledge, and it has to be able to be demonstrated and measured and verified. As a matter of fact, we have a criteria that we use for defining a skill, and essentially it must be verifiable and measurable, you have to be able to train somebody in it and of course the person has to be able to demonstrate it. On top of that, it has to be substantial, you would want a skill that is essentially big enough so people can grow within it, in other words a skill is not something you learn in 20 minutes, or even an hour or a day, it’s something you learn over time, and that way it can be tracked and people can essentially elevate their proficiency and competency in that particular skill as they develop their careers.

Steve

So it sounds like one of the key things you said, it’s something that you can learn, that takes a while to learn, and people often talk about competency sometimes, or hard to learn, so can you give an example of what would be a skill versus what would be a competency, when you’re working with clients for skills management, and they have a list of skills – what would that list typically contain?

Steve V

Well, a skill’s essentially something like Java or knowledge of a particular application, or mechanical engineering, things like that, people learn it, they go to classes for it, or they can learn on the job, whereas a competency is a softer behavioral type of skill, as you know, and it might be something like initiative, or judgment, or things like that. That’s something you also learn on the job, but you don’t go to class to learn judgment.

Steve

Right, I think that’s a good example. I sort of contrast skills and competencies, and the way I use competencies I think is very similar to how you use them, they’re more behavioral things, so I like to say skills are what you need to know to get the job in the first place, and competencies influence how you apply that knowledge once you’re in the position.

Now, when companies are looking at skills, it’s interesting because I think the idea of skills certainly has been around for a long time, but I don’t think most companies have skills management programs, do you think that’s true?

Steve V

Most companies do not, they often look strictly at competencies with soft skills, and that’s great but it’s not sufficient. What the company needs to do is build up a library of skills that essentially define the function, the main business function, that the company represents, or what the individual represents, within the context of their own assignments and function and so forth. It’s great to say that a systems analyst has certain skills that deal with behaviors, but you need to be more specific in terms of programing languages and operating systems and design capabilities and things like that.

Steve

In your experience, you’ve been doing this, as you say, for I think close to 20 years. What do you think distinguishes the companies that really invest in skills management from the ones that don’t? – because obviously we hire people for skills, we hire them because they know certain specific things, but all of the talk recently, the last ten years or so, has been about competencies and not about skills – why do you think some companies have not invested in this, and what price are they paying by not looking at skills, or why are they able to get by without really taking skills management seriously?

Steve V

Well, skills, if you go back 14, 15 years or even before, then skills were typically a skilled inventory, which basically was a list of skills that were resonant within the organization or the department or the individual, whatever the case may be, and they often were prepared by people but there were no consequences of it, they weren’t used in any way, they weren’t used to track people for career development or anything like that, so historically skills would die a slow death within an organization, because an individual never got any positive feedback or value from preparing a skills inventory, but skills-based management, or skills management, whatever you want to call it, essentially provides value to the organization and actually throughout the organization, for example there are four or five or six constituencies, each of which would benefit from a skills approach. The individual obviously does, because he or she can use it for career development and training and things like that, these are the skills that I have, what do I need to have to be successful, what am I missing, and so on and so forth. The supervisor or manager has essentially a road map to discuss career development and training and other things with the individual, so that’s a constituency that also benefits, but then you get into human resources, training people and even seeing the management, who can use all these various reports and capabilities and by-products of skills-based management to help them do their job.

For example, let’s say that someone in an organization is asked to put together a strategic training plan that addresses mission-critical IT skills that need to be developed. Well, how do you find that information out? If you have a skills inventory, that’ll tell you something about the skills, but the skills-based management actually aligns skills with an individual and within a unit and within the department, within the organization, so you can be more specific. It can also be used for recruitment. Or let’s say, finding a mechanical engineer with knowledge of autocad, DC motors, drive change design – how do you go about that? – especially when you have thousands of people within an organization, so you need to have a skills approach that captures this information, tracks this information, identifies strengths and weaknesses on an individual basis as well as an organizational basis, so that you can do strategic planning.

Steve

So it sounds like, what skills really do, and I kind of joke, a lot of what talent management is about is coming up with tools that allow people to more effectively define what ‘good’ is when they talk about a ‘good employee’, so competencies have always been about what makes an employee effective in their job and give a language for it; skills, when you talk about what you need to know to perform these jobs, what makes you qualified, and I guess my question is, how many skills are there? I think that the challenge is that, with competencies, if you look at the different costing models, Lowinger (? 8:33), PDI, O-NET, all the ones that are out there, there’s probably around 100 competencies total in the whole world, you see building relationships in all of these competencies, you see achieving results in all these competency models, but with skills, I have to think there’s lots of them, because talking about very specific things that you know or don’t know, certainly as many skills as there are courses in universities probably, at least.

How many skills do you think there are, and how many does a company need to have in a skills management library to be effective?

Steve V

Well, that’s a very good question, because skills are, there could be so many that it’s overwhelming. Let me just talk about competencies for a minute. Every competency is good, everything from initiative and judgment which I mentioned and things like that, they all sound great, and everybody should have them, in fact people don’t, so you don’t need that competency, but when it comes to skills, it’s really limited to where you are, what you do in your assignments and where you want to go, and of course it has to be aligned with the mission of the organization, but when you look at how many skills an organization should have, that could be problematic, because people identify skills that really may not be appropriate, so you really want to put together a skills library, if you will, that’s functionally oriented, organized by function, like information technology, human resources, different kinds of engineering and manufacturing and so on and so forth, but you want to be specific, you want to identify skills, as I mentioned, using the criteria that I said before, definable and measurable, verifiable and so forth, but you want to be able to do it so it’s specific enough for an individual to build on, so you need to be careful, there’s not an organization in the world where we can’t identify 10,000 skills, but 10,000 could mean everything from soup to nuts, so you really want to design something that’s very specific for an organization, use an industry-standard template or model to develop those skills for that organization, and make sure they’re aligned properly with people and their job titles and their job families, if you will.

So you’ve got to be careful when you start to identify skills, and you really want to limit them. We had a client once who had literally 1,100 skills per person, well that was not only unwieldy, it was unrealistic, and it couldn’t be used, and they actually ended up scrapping it, so once again you want to have that core set of skills that are appropriate, plus additional skills that a person might want to develop, and that requires some expertise to put that kind of stuff together.

Steve

So, looking at some of the things you’ve hit on, you were saying earlier about skills obviously are critical for a job, because these are things that you cannot perform a job if you don’t know how to do certain things, which is what skills are about, and so what I’m hearing is that, why it’s a challenge to put skills management in place is one, you have to make it a living dynamic system, so if somebody tells you their skills, and it gives you a technology mix is possible, it can’t be like a list you create once and forget about it, it has to be constantly alive list where people can say what they know.

The second thing is, you have to be very clear about defining what is a skill, so people don’t put things in that are kind of meaningless, like ‘team player’, or something like that; they need to be very hard skills that either you know or you don’t know and that you can learn.

The third thing is that, because there are so many skills, it’s one of these things where you have to really think through carefully about, what are the skills that matter? We don’t need all the skills, we don’t need to document everything that people know in the company, we need document the things that matter, and all three of those things actually are probably not trivial exercises.

Steve V

A skills library for an organization is evolutionary, in other words it continues to change and grow, as the business function changes, it changes, as new tools and capabilities are brought into the company, ageing skills that no longer apply, you want to drop and let them fall by the wayside, because they’re not critical to the success of the organization or to the individual, but one of the other things that we really need to talk about are proficiencies, within the scope of a particular skill. As you know, we’ve discussed this before, it’s not sufficient to say you have a skill, it’s not a yes or no thing, it grows as an individual grows within the job, from entry level to an industry expert, let’s say, so you really want to be able to identify the proficiency that an individual has associated with a particular skill, and that’s where proficiency definitions come into play, so you need a common yardstick, if you have somebody in Zurich and somebody in Atlanta for the same company with the same skill, they need to have the same yardstick, the same way of defining that skill, let’s say on the scale of one to five, which we recommend, where it starts at an entry level, some training or experience in the skill, to basic proficiency, mastery, company expert and industry expert, those five levels more or less is what we recommend, and seems to work very well, so you want to define the skill, not only say it exists, you want to define it on some scale that’s useable within the organization and measurable and verifiable using that definition.

Steve

I think that’s a great point, so really what defines effective in a skill really varies, I mean that’s true with competencies, probably even more so with skills, like somebody says, “I speak French”, there’s different levels of what it means to say you’re proficient in speaking French, and you need to define what the company’s expecting for different roles.

So obviously there’s a lot of stuff goes into building a really effective skills management program, can you talk a little bit about clients you’ve worked with, the benefits they’ve gotten? – maybe some examples of clients where you’ve worked with them to put skills management in place, and what it’s done for the organization to have a real clear picture of what their employees actually know how to do and need to know how to do?

Steve V

Well, there are lots of examples I can give you, we can talk a little bit about some success stories with different companies and if you like I can get into that a little bit?

Steve

Yeah, I think that would be great actually, yes, so go ahead – what’s your success stories?

Steve V

Something we did recently was that there were four separate insurance companies from four different states that merged into one, and the challenge was, we had to identify a common set of jobs and skills and what they wanted to do was establish a resource pool of talent, so they didn’t have extra people doing the same jobs in different states. So the solution essentially was relatively simple, implement and deploy an on-demand skills-based management initiative, and they used it for identifying career paths, appropriate curriculum, talent searches and staff strengths and weaknesses, kind of along the lines of a basic skills management approach, and the result in, basically improved quality of the talent pool that they had, they were more focused in terms of career development, and more suitable employees skills acquisition, and what I mean by that, they found the right people with the right skills. So that was one example of how a skills management solution can help an organization.

So there were a variety of other things, one of the other elements which we haven’t talked about is management skills, management skills kind of border line between technical skills, process skills and competencies as we define them, it’s kind of the glue that holds everything together, and worked with a major telecommunications company that were trying to develop new project managers, but the new project managers were essentially focusing on developing just the technical skills, and really weren’t prepared when the time came for assuming management responsibility, so the challenge was that, how do we get these people to incorporate management skills early in their career? And basically what we did, we identified project managers’ potential, as well as unit manager potential, and we started to give them, or incorporate management skills, project management skills, there are a variety of project management skills, as well as all the other management skills, early in their career, where they had an opportunity to fail early, where those skills could then be, where they could be trained in those skills and they could be improved and before they actually got responsibility for managing others, and that worked very well.

Steve

I think that’s a great example, I liked the idea that you separate the portion of management, because I always talk about the classic, somebody’s promoted because of their technical skills in a management position, and then they fail because they don’t have the competencies, but I think one of the things you’re hitting on is, it’s not just the competencies in terms of behavioral competencies, those are actually very hard skills that you need to learn as a manager, something like, I’ll use an example, performance evaluation, there is a right way to evaluate performance, there’s a right way to give feedback in terms of some basic guidelines that are absolutely teachable, and I think sometimes in that sense competencies could almost be seen as a cop-out, because they don’t have the competencies which in fact the company said, well that’s because you didn’t train them, and some very basic skills about how to manage, and I like that, how you’ve teased that out and said, look, the leap from individual contributor to management is not just a leap from skilled work to competency-based work, there’s actually hard skills, they’re going to be a manager, and supposedly that’s where people learn when they get an MBA, but that’s a different conversation, I suppose.

Steve V

When you transition from one type of job to another, it shouldn’t be a leap, it should be a smooth transition, a transition with skills and competencies and management skills, whatever you want to use, which are introduced, those kind of skills, early, so we can call them developmental skills or whatever, and then they have an opportunity to demonstrate and learn on the job before it became a critical part of their job, so that’s one of the things that we’d like to build into a skills management approach.

Steve

I guess the last question maybe to close the interview on, Steve, is, they’re always talking about the skills shortage in the labor market, despite the downturn in the economy, you still find pockets in certain parts of the economy, like engineering for example, where there continue to massive skills shortages – how do you see that affecting the use of skills management, are you seeing a resurgence in companies focusing on skills management to try to deal with these labor shortages?

Steve V

Well, one of the problems that, everything comes down to money unfortunately, and there is a tendency to cut, instead of cutting muscle, they’re cutting bone if you will, or fat, instead of cutting fat they’re cutting muscle, depending on how you want to look at it, and a lot of organizations have said, well, we don’t want to spend any more money on skills management or other initiatives, because training falls into that category as well, and yet there are significant talent shortages in a lot of technical areas, if you go onto Monster.com, they’ve got hundreds of thousands of job openings on it, and you think about it, in this economy there are a lot of job openings, but you need to have the skills to do it, and that’s one of the issues that companies are wrestling with.

We did some work with a major organization not long ago, they’d let a lot of people go, and in the front, that’s out the back door, in the front door they were hiring some people because they had certain skills shortages, well, as a matter of fact the people, some of the people they let go, they laid off, had those very skills, and yet they hired new people because they didn’t know these other people were leaving, and that’s one of the issues that you’re running into today, we’re laying people off with not a lot of thought about what skills are walking out the door, and that’s something they have to think about, and if they don’t know what those skills are, obviously they’ll never be able to manage that.

Steve

I think that’s a great point, that’s a good way to wrap up I think on skills, that at the end of the day if people don’t know how to do these certain specific things, they can’t perform the job, and really the more you know about what your employees are capable of doing, the more effectively you can leverage them and it’s interesting, just ending on a statistic I just recently saw, is that the United States in general, we are losing the skills of people that actually know how to make things, so if you’re a company that makes something, you’d really benefit from keeping those people in your organization, that have the skills required to actually build that, which means you have to define those.

Well, thank you Steve, some great food for thought, and again we’re talking with Steve Venokur, who’s the Managing Partner for People Science, and I obviously work a lot in talent management, I will say that People Science is one of the few companies that really has specialized specifically on skills and really so we’ll have a link to Steve’s website up on the podcast, and Steve, thank you very much for appearing on People Performance Radio.

Steve V

You are welcome.

Speaker

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