Your Company Is Building a Map of Everyone's Skills

#asaelshinder #future #career #careerdevelopment

A form appears in the HR system. Please rate yourself on the following skills, from one to five. There are forty of them, several you have never heard of, and it is due on Friday. Most people fill it in during a dull meeting and forget about it.

That may be a mistake. More large companies are trying to organise work around skills rather than job titles. They build a profile for each employee, sometimes partly filled in automatically from projects, courses and history. Then they use it to staff projects, to choose people for internal moves and to decide who gets trained for what. Some call it an internal talent marketplace. Whatever the name, a database is starting to answer the question of who could do this work.

If that database describes you badly, you may never hear about the opportunities it filtered you out of. Nobody will tell you that you were not considered for the new data platform because you skipped the form, or rated yourself a two out of modesty.

So treat the profile the way you treat your CV. Keep it current. Add the skills you actually use, not only the ones in your official role. Be honest with the numbers, because people who inflate them are found out on their first project, and that is worse than not being picked.

Look for the evidence fields. Many of these systems let you link projects, certificates or endorsements from colleagues. A claim with evidence beats a five out of five with nothing behind it.

Read the system in the other direction as well. If your company publishes which skills it wants more of, that is free information about where the work is heading. A skills gap the company is worried about is a learning plan somebody has already approved.

Keep it in proportion. These systems are imperfect, and no profile captures judgement, trust or what you are like to work with. The people who mention your name in rooms you are not in still matter as much as ever. But in a large company your next opportunity may begin as a search query, and it is worth making sure the query can find you.

Monday: open whatever skills profile your company keeps on you and read it the way a stranger would.

– Asael Shinder