Assess skills and competencies needs
Use this play to...
Use this play to identify gaps, forecast future HR needs, and help your team gain beneficial skills. Your team will appreciate the learning opportunities while your users will appreciate the improved performance.
- Assess your team’s strengths and weaknesses
- Determine training needs
- Provide employee growth opportunities
- Identify and plan potential HR requirements
- Build a stronger and more effective team
Running the play
Does your team have the right balance of competencies* to meet your priorities, objectives or the new initiative you were just tasked with? You probably have a decent understanding of your team’s strengths, weaknesses, and what each member brings to the table but have you taken the time to dissect your team members’ overall abilities? This play helps you and your team succeed by assessing your balance of competencies. You can use the results to gain insight into those weaker competencies that may require improvement. Additionally, team members can use the optional competency map to assess and evaluate their own personal balance of competencies. The results can be used to help develop individual learning plans, as well as prioritize the acquisition of competencies based on the team’s objectives. The return on this investment in your team will be invaluable and reflected in your team’s performance, sense of belonging and effectiveness. * For the purpose of this play, competencies represents knowledge, skills, abilities, personal qualities, values and traits.
This play helps you and your team succeed by assessing the balance of personalities on your team and identifying team areas for improvement. You will then proceed to create a competency map that visualizes your team’s strengths and weaknesses. Your team will then conduct a gap analysis to identify competencies needed to improve your team.
This is then followed by providing opportunities for members to express interest in those identified gaps in order to learn new skills or improve weaknesses.
The last portion will enable you to craft team member learning plans or develop an HR plan to obtain the missing competencies. The return on this investment in your team will be invaluable and reflected in your team’s performance, sense of belonging, and effectiveness.
* For the purpose of this play, competencies include knowledge, skills, abilities, personal qualities, values and traits.
Before you start
Consider running the play Build cross-disciplinary teams in conjunction with step 1 to further help determine if your team has the appropriate complement of players.
Materials
- The planning tool includes:
Individual Self-Assessment
In order to complete this exercise download a copy of Annex A- Self-Assessment. and follow these steps.
- Using a collaborative online tool such as MS Teams share the self-assessment excel document (Annex A) with your team.
- Request that each team member open the document, choose and rename one of the employee tab’s, and input a score for each skill (suggested completion time - one day).
- In the master tab add your team’s goals/objectives, and decide which skills are relevant by answer yes or no under the aligned with team goals.
- When your team has completed their individual tabs, your master worksheet will automatically update all your scores. From these results you can sort you skills by those aligned with team goals, from weakest to strongest or vice versa.
You have now completed your team’s competency needs assessment and have a customized list identifying your team’s strengths and weaknesses. Consider improving those weaknesses that will help your team achieve your goals.
Tip
Encourage your employees to save a copy of their own worksheet so they can sort their skills and/or competency groupings by weakest to strongest as a way to identify areas for personal career growth.
Post-Exercise Considerations
Use the optional Annex B – Acquiring Competencies template to establish a priority list of those weakest skills that may help your team achieve its goals. It will also serve as a planning template to identify which team members will pursue improving which skills. You now have a customized plan that helps your team members grow and achieve your goals. It is an organizational win-win.
Tip
- Advise your team to consider the information from this exercise when completing their Individual Learning Plans.
- Consider all possible training options including in-house courses offered through Transport Canada’s Learning Management System (LMS) (accessible only on the TransportCanada network), courses offered through the Canada School of Public Service, colleges and universities (ever growing online course opportunities), and conferences, etc.
Other resources on this topic
- The Treasury Board Secretariat has developed a guide to help executives develop a rigorous human resources plan that is aligned with organizations’ business objectives: Human Resources Planning Guide for Executives (Treasury Board Secretariat, 2009) (archived)
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