Skill management refers to the systematic recording and planning of the skills of employees in a department. In smaller organizations, managers may still have an overview of their employees' level of knowledge. From a certain size, a structured approach makes sense.
A service manager has to deal with two fundamental questions in particular, which represent the two sub-areas of skills management:
- – Which employee has achieved which level of competence with regard to the support of a technology (a machine type)?
- – Which employee should be developed in which areas and within which time frame?
What is the aim of skills management?
It serves to record the structure of the installed base, define the demand for individual technologies and derive from this how to position oneself in order to optimally serve the installed base. As always, everything revolves around reconciling supply and demand.
This can be a service manager or Dispatcher possibly be able to do this quite well by instinct with a team of 10 technicians. With a larger group, however, this becomes increasingly difficult and systematic skills management is essential. Also bear in mind that service managers and/or dispatchers may leave the company or that a second dispatcher/planner may need to be hired due to growth. In this case, new managers or dispatchers should also be able to find out quickly and easily about the employees' level of knowledge.
Effective skills management also makes it easier to push through additional investments in the service area with superiors. This structured approach makes it much easier to identify skills and capacity gaps in your own team that cannot be closed even with standard training measures. This is very useful if you want to strengthen your team with additional technicians. Especially in difficult economic times, decision-makers will not want to rely solely on the gut feeling of a service manager.
How does skill management work?
First, a skills matrix is typically created. This is a tabular overview of the current status of skills and the target status in the period under review (typically the calendar year, as the planning of training is also part of the annual meetings with the technicians). Such a skills matrix could look something like this, but must of course be defined for the respective organization itself:
First and foremost, of course, we want to record technical skills in the Skill Matrix: Which technician can look after which machine? However, other skills can of course also be recorded. For example, the ability to operate application software. Soft skills can also be the subject of consideration. This usually involves skills in the area of conflict management or Further training of technicians in the sales area.
How much time does skills management typically take?
It is customary to plan for an entire year. For example, the current status can be recorded at the end of the financial year and the objectives for the coming year can be discussed in the employee appraisal. The performance review and status adjustment should take place at least once a quarter. Then it is time to update the skill matrix and check whether interim goals have been achieved as planned.
What should you look out for?
- The targets for your employee development should not be defined by the service department alone. Instead, you should coordinate closely with sales and incorporate their current sales forecasts. In this way, you can better estimate how the installed base that your technicians need to serve will develop. New machines may also be introduced. In this case, you need to know when and how many employees you need to train on the relevant types.
- Skill management must also be closely linked to career management. If it is stipulated there, for example, that two technologies must be mastered at expert level in order to be promoted to the highest salary level - then this should be measurable and assessable using the criteria in skills management. Otherwise, this always leads to discussions as to why individual employees do not reach the next salary level.
- The procedure and matrix should be coordinated with the works council, as it is a kind of performance and success measurement of employees and the works council typically reacts with a sniffy face if it is not consulted on such issues and torpedoes the procedure in the worst case.
