What is a Skills Audit?

A skills audit is a survey of a targeted group of people to identify their level of competence or capability in a specific skill or set of skills.

It will give you essential information to help you to:

• Identify who has the necessary skills to perform well
• Who needs to improve in which skills
• How much improvement is needed and in whom
• Why and where to target your training and development activity

A skills audit will often arise from, and complement the training needs identified during appraisals and other performance management activities.

Here’s how it works.

Step 1. We’ll let everyone know what’s happening and why.

A skills audit can often be seen as threatening to both managers and staff, so it’s crucial to spend time communicating with everyone about what we’re doing and why. We’ll tell everyone the scope of the audit, and include a description of the methods to be deployed and how the information gathered will be analysed and used.

Step 2: Together we’ll identify standards of competence.

We will need to identify and agree objective performance standards for the skills to be audited. We can do that for you by conducting a job analysis or from the competency standards that already exist for the skills required.

Step 3: We will then conduct the skills audit.

We will use a paper based or online process as appropriate. We need to make sure that everyone involved can respond easily. We will need you to encourage everyone in the target group to take part in and respond to the skills audit.

Step 4:  Reporting

We’ll write a report of the key findings and outcomes of the skills audit for you to use as you wish. We’ll also suggest some next steps for you to consider.

If you have any questions about this process, or would like to know more, please send us an email or get in touch on +44 (0) 7 989 951 194.