You did it! All your employees have done their assessments, filled out your neatly crafted skill matrix spreadsheet, and you’ve gathered all the results in a pivot table. Now what? Far too often, this is where it ends. Sometimes, if there are serious issues, a course might follow, but more often this data gets to live on a company drive somewhere, gathering digital dust and disappearing when the infrastructure department asks you to clear some space three years later.

What if that spreadsheet was replaced by a skill intelligence tool? A tool that not only keeps the data around but brings it to life. In its proper ecosystem, this data can cause an evolution in how you manage skills at the office. It changes looking at a snapshot to witnessing a lifecycle:

-          Who is growing?
-          Who is stuck?
-          Who has untapped potential?
-          Which teams are becoming fragile?
-          Which titles risk creating gaps if somebody leaves?
-          Which gaps keep coming back?

Assessments show low or high scores. What they don’t show is growing or fading interest. There’s no root causes ready to be explored, no view in awakened interests, no linked relevancy of the skills to the role and how it evolves (AI is a good example of this), no creation of opportunities that can be visualized in results.

Due to this, the experience the employees get is that they are just retaking the same picture over and over, which can even lead to such frustration that it increases your turnover. You give the impression of not investing in people. There’s a real need for visualizing things like skill gaps across several teams, dependencies on one or two experts and decaying skills because people don’t use them. These are the patterns a picture can never give, you need the lifecycle.

By having a tool that allows you to cooperate with your employees on their skillset and ambitions, you create an environment which helps everyone feel supported and they can get their ambitions met. You can show people where they are today, where they could or should be tomorrow, and which specific skillset they need to acquire to get there. You connect them to the opportunities, provide them with achievable goals and show them whether or not they’re doing well on their path. Suddenly this data which cost quite the effort to get, starts being alive. New insights emerge for both the HR department and the people trying to improve their skills.

If you are already investing time in assessments, don’t let the results become another forgotten spreadsheet. Turn them into a living memory of your organization’s skills: one that shows growth, reveals stagnation, uncovers hidden patterns, and helps employees see where they can go next.