My Journey to Seera (part 2)
In part one of this article I shared some of the talent management challenges I faced as CEO of Readify, as we grew and diversified. So, with those experiences under my belt, when I started Transfit, targeting a significantly more diverse consulting workforce, I was determined to implement a standardised skills measurement solution as part of our workforce alignment strategy.
Thus, I spent many late nights creating a "skills library", describing 250 capabilities across technical consulting, management consulting, personal and interpersonal attributes, and leadership skills and experience, along with proficiency measures against each so I could rank relative proficiency. Finally,I had to compose position descriptions from the skills library so that we had the standardised capabilities and measurements I wanted across all roles.
In the end, as you can imagine, I wound up with a completely unwieldy Excel workbook that was practically impossible for staff and candidates to self-assess against, let alone the ability to run the cross functional, business wide analysis I wanted. So, I went to market looking for a solution.
The first thing I discovered is that someone else had already done the "skills library" thing for me – damn, all that work for nothing. They are called Competency Frameworks, and there are literally dozens of them available in the public domain addressing most major industries and professions, including IT - check out SFIA if you want more information. Now, I may be a bit slow out of the blocks, or maybe they are the best kept secret in talent management, but discovering Competency Frameworks was a real "aha moment" for me.
This wasn't just the realisation that these Competency Frameworks existed, with some being very sophisticated and mature, but that clearly I wasn't the only one who had recognised the core problem around the lack of consistency and alignment across skills within the enterprise. The other thing I discovered is that these frameworks themselves were no more than spreadsheets or documents, so, whilst encouraged by their public availability, I still needed some sort of software solution to implement them.
But before I could get too far into my assessment of available solutions, COVID-19 hit, and there went my customers along with my staff and my ambitious plans for Transfit, and like many others, leaving me with a mountain of bills and debt. But this story doesn’t end there and does have a happy ending –as you may have guessed.
So, stay tuned for part three of this article where I share some of my recent job-hunting experiences and how these made me even more determine to find a more transparent, data driven solution to talent management. In the meantime, please leave a comment below if you are already using competency frameworks or, if like me, you didn't know they existed?