This content originally appeared in the W2O company blog.
Just like individuals, all teams have strengths and weaknesses. These can be pretty apparent when it comes to day-to-day responsibilities. However, strengths and weaknesses are less apparent when starting a digital maturity effort.
To address this, we recommend teams complete a skills assessment, which is a quick and easy exercise to gain a collective view of a team’s competencies as well as skill gaps. The purpose of this exercise is not to point out any one team member’s deficiencies but rather to ensure the team collectively has the skills and expertise needed to execute digital maturity initiatives.
Step 1: Identify Skills Needed
First, teams need to take an inventory of what skills will be needed in their digital maturity efforts. Every situation will require slightly different expertise. However, a core set of capabilities are required for almost every team—we recommend the following skill areas:
- Knowledge of existing (legacy) systems
- Marketing tool knowledge
- Collaboration tool knowledge
- Analytics expertise
- Finance expertise
- UI/UX expertise
- Marketing expertise
- Project management expertise
Step 2: Team Survey
After identifying the most critical set of skills, a survey needs to be conducted for each team member to assess their own proficiency with regard to each. This survey should contain clear and detailed descriptions of both the skills and the ratings for each.
Step 3: Identify Strengths and Weaknesses
After the survey is complete, a clear view of strengths and weaknesses will come to light. In the hypothetical example below, the team is strong in many areas but needs improvement in skills 7 and 8.
Step 4: Address Gaps
There are multiple options to address skills gaps; we break them down into three basic categories—Train, Hire, Outsource. Which path to take largely depends on two things—how quickly does the skill gap need to be filled and how specialized is the lacking skill.
Training existing team members has the clear benefit of costing much less than other options. It’s also important to realize that training team members on new skills will increase employee engagement and lower attrition. However, training also requires a lot of time that may leave a particular skill unaddressed for too long. Further, some skills are so specialized that it is impractical to train someone from scratch.
Hiring new team members can not only close a skill gap, but can also increase the performance of the overall team. However, hiring can be a long process, especially when looking for a specialized skill set.
Outsourcing skills to an agency, consultancy, or contractors is not always favored because it can be less cost–effective than training. However, outsourcing has the benefit of closing skills gaps nearly immediately and allows companies to utilize experts in specialized fields. Oftentimes W2O is hired by our clients to fill gaps in communications, marketing, or analytic functions. Further, we focus on knowledge transfer to our clients in order to ensure benefits well into the future.
A helpful framework for deciding whether to train, hire, or outsource can be seen below:
Filling these skills gaps is a critical first step to any digital maturity journey as it allows the team to be agile when address changing technology and business needs. Further, when team members transfer out of the team, using a skills assessment will make obvious what skills are needed from the incoming replacement. Much like the concept of digital maturity itself, the overall skill profile of a team is constantly evolving and the skills assessment is the tool to ensure critical functions are always being met.