Workforce profiling

ASR’s principals have conducted numerous whole-of-organisation projects around the concept of workforce profiles. Profiles are usually based on standardised behaviours, skills, knowledge and other forms of competencies.

Through building skill and knowledge taxonomies that are organisation-specific (noting that profiles between organisations often contain many similar items), ASR is able to describe positions, people and training courses.

By matching any two of these three items many human resources management processes can be populated with useful information. Examples include:

  • Selection—matching a job with candidates to find best fit.
  • Training needs—matching a person’s profile with their current job to identify gaps. These training gaps can be aggregated to identify priority training needs across an organisation.
  • Career plans—matching a person’s complete profile against a range of potential positions to identify a personal career plan.
  • Succession planning—matching a position against many potential candidates to identify who could fulfil a role in the future and what development needs should be addressed to make succession as smooth as possible.
  • New to role training suite—matching available training courses to position profiles to identify a suite of courses that should be completed by any new incumbent.

The challenge in workforce profiling is to build a comprehensive and well-structured taxonomy while making it simple to search and apply. ASR uses software to store taxonomies and also to conduct matching people and jobs to generate training needs.

ASR has conducted workforce profiles for the following needs:

  • Mapping the skills sets needed and held in a marketing community within a large telco
  • Identifying successors for executive positions
  • Identifying successors and training needs for a critical job role within a large organisation
  • Mapping all skills and knowledge and all positions within an LNG plant and refinery
  • Mapping all skills and knowledge for an electronics manufacturer and wholesaler
  • Identifying training needs by mapping jobs and people of an IT department within a very large educational institution
  • Writing standardised position descriptions.