After the first set of articles (you can find references here) on how to evaluate people potential, let’s now move to the world of “skills”.
The freedictionary defines skill as “Proficiency, facility, or dexterity that is acquired or developed through training or experience”.
This means that, despite you have people working with you on a daily basis, they may have built during their professional experience abilities that represent and define them as a fingerprint.
Though representing a valuable asset, this talents have different weight on your working context, because part can be useful and part not.
So what is important is to have a mapping of skills, crafted to what you need to run your business. And after having acquired the situation in terms of existing and gap toward the desired state, since skills are addressable through experience and training, you can design a plan to address this gap.
But let’s start from the beginning.
What is a skill assessment?
On a “definition basis”, is the process through which you are going to map skills, expressed through actions and behaviors, owned by a person, and map them toward a desired state.
On an “opportunity basis” a way to better know you people and define how and at which risk/cost you can craft your organization
What a skill assessment is not?
A skill assessment is not an hidden evaluation of people, nor a judgement on their personal behavior.
A skill assessment is not a performance evaluation or a way to evaluate potential.
Some preliminary thoughts
As usual we will go in depth through the different steps to have a successful assessment, but some preliminary considerations are worth sharing.
- There’s no one size fits all rule: businesses are different and so are the skills needed to run them
- Doing a skill assessment without acting after results is a loss of time not worth starting
- Be clear on the objectives you’re pursuing to avoid misunderstanding with people
- Skill changes with time and your organization, so is fundamental to update results on a regular basis
- At a macro level you could make a couple of groups dividing the cake in knowledge and personal skills. but this grouping can be different if you move from operational roles to more managerial ones. So to be clear, for the purpose of this article we will focus more on the first type.


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