What is a Skills Audit?

A skills audit is a review of the skills and knowledge your employees have. It allows you to see the gaps in their expertise, and understand the areas you need to improve.

Not all members of staff will have the same skills. Some might be masters of finance while others are IT experts. This is how it should be: if every employee had the same skills, your organisation would be stagnant.

However, the Senior Management and Board of an organisation should have an understanding of who can do what. Some skills are more crucial than others. Conducting a full review can help you see if any key areas need improving.

Most organisations already have audits. They come in many different forms like financial and compliance reviews. Although there’s no legal obligation to have a skills audit, they can streamline your organisation and give you a competitive edge.

Need any more reason to conduct a skills audit? We’ve put together some ways they can help your business:

Why Do You Need a Skills Audit?

A skills audit allows you to compare the skills you need and the skills you already have. This means you can take action and change things that aren’t working as well as they could. You can give your staff the training and development they need or make changes in the recruitment process.

An audit can assess whether your organisation will meet its goals in the long term. The board has put a lot of effort into creating the perfect development plan. No matter how much your staff want to achieve this plan, it’s no use if they don’t have the required skills!

As a result, a skills audit is crucial for future planning. Maybe the skills of the team are suitable for their current roles, but not everything can stay the same forever. What happens if your CEO steps down? Whether or not you decide to recruit an external CEO, it’s useful to know which skills the senior managers can provide during the transition.

Last but not least, a skills audit can be useful on an individual level. If staff know their own weaknesses, they can work through them. It can also encourage individuals to take on extra responsibilities they are suited to while discouraging them from doing work that someone else could do better.

A skills audit turns the subjective view your staff have of their role into an objective set of data.

How Do You Conduct a Skills Audit?

Before you start implementing a skills audit, make sure you have a plan. Don’t dive in with quizzing your staff on their competencies! The project should be organised professionally with the right person in charge of its coordination. A skills audit is a key part of your internal process and you should create a clear line of responsibility.

The next stage is to identify the skills that are important to your organisation. An audit shouldn’t just be a generic template you’ve found on the internet. You need to consider the way you operate and the specific roles you rely on.

Remember to think about the future! Your organisation might change to require new skills, and you should be flexible to accommodate these changes.

Once you’ve done this, you can begin to conduct a survey. There are several different ways of doing this such as through in-person interviews or a digital questionnaire.

As a rule, you should approach every individual on your team and assess their strengths and weaknesses. Depending on the size and structure of your organisation, this may involve different procedures.

The most important part of a skills audit is putting everything in one place. This information already exists! Your employees know their strengths. An audit is simply about organising the data in an understandable form.

When it comes to analysing the results, make sure they are presented clearly. Tools like Excel or Google Suite might seem like a great start for assessing performance, but they are limited. For a more professional approach, invest in software that is designed for business.

How Can Convene Help with a Skills Audit?

A Board Portal like Convene can make it easy to assess your staff, so you can move forward as an organisation. Our all-in-one meeting management software is designed for the highest level of security. Convene has built in processes such as surveying and a complete audit trails so you can regularly assess the efficacy of your organisation. Beyond this you can also ensure the best possible Board meetings with effective collaboration both before, during and after the meetings, including autogenerated meeting minutes and Action Items to streamline your processes.

Convene is now also available fully integrated with Microsoft Teams, so your whole organisation can benefit from our governance features.

The fully GDPR-compliant software can streamline your internal processes and ensure all documents are protected from external threats. With the right software, the complex task of auditing can be much easier! Read our customer success stories or book a demo.