The challenge
The client is an international company with tens of thousands of employees that wanted to understand its workforce's skills.
A key question was which skills its business-critical employees hold, and whether there is a skill gap between those people and their potential successors.
Our solution
We developed an interactive tool for skill gap analysis between employees. It uses NLP analytics to extract and parse skills from unstructured text such as position descriptions, performance reviews and CVs.
The extracted skills are organised into a three-level hierarchical skill profile, and profiles can be compared at each level: the general level describes a broad business area such as IT or finance; the function level describes a function within that area, such as software development or accounting; and the skill level holds the specific skills extracted from employee profiles.
- Skill extraction from position descriptions, performance reviews, CVs and other unstructured text
- Three-level hierarchical skill profiles: general, function and skill level
- Comparison of employees' skill profiles at each hierarchical level
- Interactive exploration of employees' skill profiles
The outcome
The tool gave the client a clear picture of its employees' skills, helped identify potential successors for business-critical roles and showed which training is needed to close the identified skill gaps. The analytics also informed wider talent management questions, including recruitment, succession and training.
In total, the project saved the client around 10,000 man-hours.
