Skill management in project management refers to the systematic identification, development, and allocation of skills and competencies required for the success of a project.
Skill management in the age of artificial intelligence: The optimal use of employee skills for corporate success
by Thomas Schlereth, CEO, Can Do
Skill management develops employee skills for corporate success. It promotes strong teams and adaptability in a fast-paced business environment, particularly in highly skilled industries. By identifying and planning the required skills, skill management contributes to the competitiveness of companies. In a sense, it represents the next expansion stage of resource management. Specialized software and artificial intelligence support this.
What is skill management and what does it mean?
In a rapidly evolving environment, it is absolutely essential to constantly adapt.
Skill management or competency management primarily deals with the development of necessary skills of employees in a company in order to achieve the company's economic goals. It is fundamentally similar to resource management, in which it is also integrated. However, skill management, as the name says, is not limited to the available employee time, but focuses primarily on the skills actually available (or required).
A company is only as strong as the skills of its workforce, and only strong companies can be successful.
In Germany in particular, where the economy is heavily influenced by highly qualified industries such as the manufacturing industry, the technology industry and the automotive industry, the skills of employees are of decisive importance. Companies must ensure that they have the right skills to remain competitive in these industries.
This can only be achieved if people in the company constantly improve their skills; this is referred to as “lifelong learning.”
Skill management as a specialized form of resource management and in the context of this essay therefore describes how the decisive questions regarding the capabilities in a company can be answered: What skills do we have? Which skills do we need? When and in what quantities do we need them?
This then results in entrepreneurial activities in the areas of in-house continuing education, recruiting new personnel, external recruitment and capacity planning.
Strategic planning
Strategic corporate planning formulates goals, which are then reflected in measures, i.e. strategic project planning.
In these projects, it is necessary to identify and quantify resource requirements. Accordingly, this results in a time and quantity requirement for people with suitable skills.
However, this very simple logic “the need for skilled workers results from strategic planning” is often unclear to many companies.
The strategic visions of management are usually very abstract and can hardly be divided into projects. Upper and middle management also often does not have sufficient project expertise to formulate implementation models in the form of projects from the strategic goals. Management must be the first to close this gap in order to establish successful skill management in the company.
The first step from the theoretical strategy to its practical implementation must therefore come from management and not from underlying levels.
Benefits of skill management
The benefits of skill management in companies are very extensive and complex, so only individual facets can be examined here. The basis, however, is the simple principle that tasks are completed by people who have an idea of what they are doing there. They are therefore the right specialists with all the positive consequences.
Since skilled workers are not only rare but also expensive, this requires perfect planning and execution. The primary benefit of skill management is therefore the efficient use of cost-intensive personnel. This is also different from pure resource management, which is not so dedicated to skills and qualifications.
Good, concrete and strategic planning makes the need for skills visible in the future. In particular, impending bottlenecks can be identified at an early stage, which can then be closed in a targeted manner, for example by training personnel.
In the IT sector in particular, the need for new knowledge has often been met by external service providers in the past. This was a disastrous decision for many companies, as internal employees are now doing the “outdated” things while there is a dependency on external service providers in the highly qualified areas. Clever companies do it the other way around and outsource the “easy” issues to external service providers. This has economic advantages (“easy” topics can be purchased more cheaply) and retains key competencies in the company — an additional benefit of skill management.
Another benefit of increasing importance is the global use of internal capabilities: Companies can distribute the skills of people at various locations in the world and sometimes among subsidiaries.
A project planner must have an up-to-date and realistic statement about the availability of skills across the entire corporate complex. It must also have access to these resources in order to use them. In many companies, the work results of the more expensive, highly qualified people are available digitally and can be “transported” worldwide in real time; the location is therefore irrelevant.
Middle management that refuses to immediately make their subordinate, location-based resources available to other locations must be replaced immediately. No company in the world can afford to let highly qualified personnel sit around because the superior department manager is afraid of losing significance.
Skill Management Software
Most software solutions for skill management deal with the collection of existing skills and their documentation. They also offer functions for the targeted development of skills in the workforce — such as planning training and further developments.
However, this also means that these products are limited to presenting and analyzing the current state of the skills currently available, and they provide planning assistance for expanding these skills. All of this takes place in isolation: Skills are recorded, planned and documented — but without reference to the actual skill requirements of ongoing or future projects.
Further developed tools are needed to find out which skills are specifically needed, where they can be found in the company, when they are available and whether they can also be procured externally — especially when strategic planning is to become operational projects. Such tools must do much more than the static recording of skills:
They must be able to offer concrete measures to close the overall skill requirement.
They should form the planning basis for internal qualification and external procurement.
They must fully cover the project and portfolio management of companies of all sizes.
Since the capacities and capabilities of the current workforce continue to be incorporated into planning, complete and very powerful resource management is required.
Management software that can handle skill management in such a comprehensive way must be able to handle an extensive and extremely complex amount of information. Such systems cannot do without offering support based on artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence and skill management
The complexity of skill management mentioned above lies in the difficult and inaccurate predictability of future projects and their quantitative requirement of skills, particularly as these projects result from long-term strategic planning by management.
In addition, complexity is increased by the fact that people have several skills, which are then required in certain combinations for the respective project. The future is therefore imprecise, and planning people and their abilities is complex.
Artificial intelligence can identify the most likely situations from all possible situations that arise in the future. AI can also simulate how people carry out the planned work. This results in potential risks due to a lack of skill requirements. These risks can be closed in the short term through staffing with suitable people and in the long term through training. The amount of data needed to make a decision is therefore reduced to the essentials by AI.
The AIs are being developed very quickly and in the near future, these systems will be able to plan the strategic planning of top management specifically with existing personnel (staffing). Even in the event of bottlenecks that even AI cannot close with suitable people, the AI will identify and perhaps implement concrete measures to solve the problem.
Perhaps the AI will then fill in a shortfall of existing skills — by itself.
Only companies that are at the forefront of computer-aided skill management can