How does your company ensure it has the right talents in the right positions – today and tomorrow? We’ll examine why competency development is so crucial in today's workplace and explore digital opportunities for streamlining the process.
Re-skilling, upskilling, competence supply, and "cultivating a learning culture" are all hot topics when investing in employee skills and competency development. But what are the actual benefits of strategic competency management? Let's delve deeper into this!
Why Your Company Should Invest in Competency Management and Development
By continually mapping and analyzing your company's collective skills and competency needs, you can identify vulnerabilities, knowledge gaps, and critical competencies your company cannot do without. These insights can then be used to make more precise decisions, from new hires to internal training efforts.
Furthermore, companies today face the challenge of keeping their knowledge bank up to date with the rapidly changing external environment. Keeping employees' skills current is crucial for companies looking to maintain long-term innovation capability and competitiveness.
Last but not least, we find ourselves in a situation where the competition for talent is growing fiercer, and companies are struggling to attract the right competency (article in Swedish). Simultaneously, recruiting new personnel is both costly and time-consuming. In other words, as an employer, you have everything to gain by maximizing the chances of employees staying on board – which happens when you offer them the right opportunities for growth and development together with you.
You can read more about the keys to successful competency management here.
Simplifying Competency Management Through Digitalization
It's undeniable that employers have much to gain by prioritizing competency development. However, many managers and HR departments grapple with cumbersome and inefficient administration. With numerous employees and large volumes of data to manage (possibly scattered across various systems, diverse spreadsheets, or folders), achieving a clear structure and overview can be a real challenge. But did you know that there are digital solutions to simplify this task?
One of the most significant advantages of using a modern HR system is gathering all information about employees, their skills, and competency development in one place, ensuring that managers and administrators always have a complete overview. Additionally, competence matrices and other visual graphics help make your data understandable, allowing you to identify knowledge gaps that need to be filled and steer competency development toward your set goals. In short, by digitizing your work, your company can reduce time-consuming administration related to employee competencies and improve quality.
New Feature: Course Automation in Flex HRM Employee
Is our new colleague scheduled for the next first aid course? When is the next session? And, what's the status of my team's certificates and time-limited competencies – do they need renewal?
A common challenge in competency development within companies is managing courses and course scheduling for employees. To simplify your job as an administrator, we have added a new and even smarter version of our course management to the Flex HRM Employee HR system. With this feature, released in the spring of 2023, the goal has been to further automate management by synchronizing all information related to courses and competencies into a single seamless process.
So, how does it work in practice? In a new, user-friendly overview, you, as an administrator, have complete control over everything related to courses. You can see which course sessions are available, their locations, whether they are online, and how many slots are available. You can also track which employees are scheduled for specific courses, who are registered, and who has completed or not completed the course. All course-related information is conveniently located in one place.
In addition to providing a more straightforward overview, you also have access to smart shortcuts that eliminate unnecessary duplicate work. For instance:
- Mass Update Course Status
You can quickly add multiple participants to a course session and then mass update the employees' course status, such as marking them as approved after completing a course.
- Automatic Competence Updates
After completing a course, participants' competencies are automatically updated, eliminating the need for manual updates for each employee. A significant time-saver!
-
Deadline Management
The system notifies you when a certificate or any other type of competence needs renewal after a certain period. Set a validity date, and the system sends notifications to supervisors, employees, or other relevant parties, ensuring no essential deadlines are missed.
Ready for Smarter Competence Development? We're Here to Help!
Do you and your colleagues feel it's time to level up your competency development management? Learn more about how Flex HRM Employee can streamline and enhance your work here or contact us, and we'll show you how!
