ServiceNow Skills Management: A Better Way to Manage your Workforce Skills

[Manjeet Singh]

A Skill is the ability to do something that comes from training, experience, or practice. Skills is the most important resource of human beings, organizations and nations. As per the report from Gartner, “Most companies don’t have an accurate inventory of the available skills of their current IT workforce”. Gartner predicts that, by 2020, 75 percent of organizations will experience visible business disruptions due to skills gaps.

Having the right people with the right skills at appropriate levels, is essential for all organizations. Getting there requires a definitive and detailed answer to four key questions:

1. What skills do we have?
2. What skills do we need?
3. How to fill the skills gaps that are aligned with our short/long term strategy?
4. How to show ROI from your skill management efforts?

So, the big question becomes: is it acceptable for any CIO, VP of IT, HR Director, or any senior leader, to not know the answers?

As companies are going through their digital transformation journey, not having insights in your workforce skills data and gaps can impact your bottom line or strategic decision making around hiring and training people.

What are the issue with skills management today?

Ability to do skills management properly is not easy. Skills and skill level inside an organizations keeps on changing (new people join, people leave, people go through training to acquire new skills.etc). Here are few challenges that makes skills management hard today:

1. Skill data is scattered across multiple systems (HR, PPM) and not close to the operational work.
2. No standardization when it comes to skill taxonomy and skill proficiency level.
3. The interactions between skills, people, work and performance are complex and have emergent properties
4. Skills gaps insights are not available and this makes unsystematic career planning and training investments fail to yield the desired results.

ServiceNow Skills Management: A Better Way to Manage your workforce Skills

ServiceNow Skill Management allows you to capture all the skills used in your organization in an automated way and brings skills closer to where the work is happening so that you can drive the value of your well-trained workforce.

Provides standardized skill taxonomy

Skills Taxonomy feature enables customer to organize their skills in a standardized way for easy management and reporting. (e.g. Technical – Software development – Java). Create parent/child categories as needed and organize your related skills under the ‘leaf’ category in the hierarchy (see screenshot below). Skills taxonomy is a new table “cmn_skill_category.list” automatically installed with the skill plugin.

Easy to add skills proficiency level

This enables customer to use different skills levels (e.g. Aware: Familiar: Proficient: Expert) without duplicating skills records. Skill types with skill level structure allows easy management and association of level to users and groups. You start with creating a Skill Level types and then define different levels.

Easy skill gap analysis using prebuilt Skills Analytics Dashboard

Skill Dashboard enables customer to do skill gap analysis using skill matrix report, look at top ten skills, find out who has what skills and make informed coaching/training/hiring decisions. 

Auto skill determination

Now you can easily automate the identification of skills required for work items using rules, which eliminates the need to assign them manually. Enable "com.snc.skill_determination” plugin to auto assign skills to a task. Setup skill determination rule on any task table. For example, if incident comes from location ‘France’ assign ‘French’ as required skill.

Assign task based on skill and skill levels

Having the ability to assign task based on individual's skill and skills level is very impactful in reducing ticket assignment rate, reducing MTTR and increasing end user satisfaction. Now, you can fully automate the skill based task assign using skills determination and advanced work routing (AWA) features available on ServiceNow platform.When a new task comes in AWA queue, it will be evaluated based on skill gap criteria:

– # of matching skills
– # of matching skill level
– Total skill level gap

Auto reward skill when coaching task is finished

The ServiceNow Coaching application lets you facilitate the coaching of employees using coaching opportunities that are conditionally configured for a critical moment in a process. Starting from NewYork release, you can auto award setting when people finish their coaching and certification. Enable Coaching plugin and under Coaching Opportunity list down the skills. Once the coaching assessment task is finished, the listed skills will be automatically associated to the user under training.

Skill content library for quick start

If you are starting with skills management first time then you can use “com.snc.skills_management.seed data “ plugin to get sample list of categories and skills for ITSM. This comes with 150 common ITSM skills to provide a great starting point for new customers. Skill library data provides quick on-boarding for ITSM customers. The number of skills available in library will increase in future release with content from other product line (for example CSM and HR). 

Summary

The key to delivering digital value at scale is having the people with right skills and a skills management solution that requires no to minimal manual efforts; and provide transparency & insightful analysis to managers and individuals. Make sure you are taking the advantage of ServiceNow skills management to empower your employees and give them opportunity to level up their skills for career advancement, drive higher employee engagement, and employee satisfaction.