In five steps we translate the organisational strategy into a number of critical skills needed to successfully implement said strategy.

Step 1: Determining the most appropriate approach

In a skill roadmap, you build a qualitative strategic workforce planning: you start from the strategic challenges and translate them into the necessary skills.

• Some companies want to start with their leadership level first: which leadership skills do we really need to be successful?
• Other companies start with a key department or business unit (e.g. IT or a commercial business unit).
• Still other companies start from a number of critical reference functions: functions with high operational and/or strategic impact and/or high turnover risk (where it is not easy to replace these people and the impact on the business is high). They use these reference functions as a basis for mapping and developing the potential in the organisation towards these critical functions.

Step 2: Translating the strategy and the commercial and operational challenges into skills

In this step we determine (adapted to the chosen focus), through a strategic dialogue with the top leadership team and key business units, what are the most critical skills at different levels: on which skills will success depend?

From strategy (what do we want to achieve) to concrete actions (how are we going to achieve it): this part of the dialogue is about "if we want to achieve X, we have to do Y."

From concrete actions to skills: what skills/knowledge do we need to do this successfully?

• We do this initially through a spontaneous dialogue with your top leadership people, without pushing them into a 'harness' of skills. We help them with your skills catalogue (if it exists) and our skill quiz.
• We then map the outcome of this dialogue with talentguide^©: we use this AI-driven tool to perform a matching with the international European skills taxonomy and the skills used by many other companies.
• Based on the output of the strategic dialogue and current job descriptions, we build, through AI, a future-oriented skill profile per role/function.
• Through workshops, we fully customise those skill profiles for your company.

Step 3: Creation of the skill profiles of the employees

In the next step, we load employee information into talentguide^©. This includes CVs, LinkedIn info, assessments, HR info, etc.

• This is how we obtain a skill profile per employee that can easily be matched with the skill profiles of the jobs.
• Each manager can further adjust this profile together with the individual employee.

Step 4: The dialogue on personal development between employee and manager is concretely supported

Many organisations have been grappling for years with how to become a 'learning organisation' and how to use 'personal development plans' effectively. We all know how crucial employee development is, but it doesn't really get off to a flying start. Many employees do not have a (real) development plan, or it is very functionally focused on doing the job as it is, or it is difficult to know whether development plans (and thus investments) are in line with the strategy ...

The individual skill-match solves this:

• It is a very solid basis for a very concrete and focused skill development plan per person. With this, we do away with "fluffy and random" PDPs.
• For the manager, this also removes the 'white sheet' syndrome ('how do I get started?'): after all, the skill-match and the skill-gaps are indicated concretely per employee. The manager can easily, concretely and constructively focus the skill development plan on bridging the existing gaps. That is much easier than the abstract question 'build a personal development plan'.
• This way, the skill development plan is directly linked to the strategy and skills we will need in the future. The investments we make in training and development are therefore automatically much better spent.

Step 5: HR can build a much more targeted & effective policy at organisational level

HR can additionally use the aggregated data to build its Build, Bind, Buy, Bounce strategy:

• Build: for which skill groups do you have the most important gaps?
  Based on this information, you can develop a focused training and development policy.
• Bind: which people have (the potential of) critical skills towards the future?
  This is how you build a targeted retention policy.
• Buy: for which skills do you have important gaps that you cannot solve via internal training and other solutions? For these skills you will search the labour market in a targeted and proactive way.
• Bounce: are there also people who have too big a skill-gap and are in danger of not being able to keep up? With this information, you can anticipate and look for good, social solutions.