It’s time to identify the soft skills that are manifested in everyday life and need to be worked on in favor of the success of the training and, consequently, of the company. Where to start?
Now that we know which tasks impact the training indicators, as discussed here, it’s time to identify the skills that need to be worked on throughout the training to improve the performance of the tasks highlighted in the previous step.
In this kind of “cascading effect”, we start from a macro objective (increase productivity, improve sales, etc.) to analyze the performance of each team member, identify the essential tasks for carrying out the work, and, now, the identification of skills needed to perform such tasks.
And the first step to take here lies in, with the help of the KSA methodology (Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudes), returning to the analysis carried out during the training needs diagnosis, described in this article, and understanding, task by task, which are the necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes, in a first moment, and desirable, in a second.
In practice, this work tends to flow much more if we have all the stakeholders involved in that function gathered for an honest and detailed conversation about the skills that will need to be developed. Therefore, the ReFrame way of doing this is through the organization of a face-to-face workshop, with the presence of the HR, training, and operations areas (target of the training), in which the members from these areas are mixed in round tables.
Then, each one is asked to write five essential skills for the execution of each task that is being discussed and will be worked on throughout the training. Next, the group at each table is asked to reach a consensus on these five skills (based on the previous individual notes) and then the whole workshop group seeks consensus, debating and categorizing each skill to avoid repetitions (be careful with different terms to designate the same things!) and choose the skills that will be worked on. All of this is done with post-its on the wall, on a big mind map.
Here, we are still not analyzing whether or not employees have those skills (something that may have been fully or partially resolved in the recruitment and selection process, for example). The intention is simply to identify the necessary (or minimum) skills, first, so that you can move on to the desirable skills.
A question that may be relevant throughout this process is: are there differences when identifying these skills, separating them between soft and hard skills, for example?
The answer is a resounding “yes”. This is because, during the workshop, the tendency is for hard skills (which are more “objective”) to emerge more easily than soft skills, which may require a more subjective analysis. A good tip here is to encourage everybody to make a drawing that represents that position or function. This type of approach, more playful, greatly facilitates the expression of valued attitudinal attributes and, from there, it is easier to tease about the behavioral skills that are necessary or desirable to perform the task being analyzed.
Pitfalls to be avoided
The consolidation into five skills to be developed serves as a prerogative to avoid a very common mistake in this process: the identification of an excess of skills that those professionals need to present (and develop) and make training unfeasible. We want good professionals working on the team, not superheroes. Training should only exist within a “real life” context in organizations, not an “idealized reality”.
Even the differentiation of skills between necessary and desirable serves the purpose of making the training objective something achievable, within what is possible. It is for no other reason that this classification between minimum and desirable skills tends to generate more discussions and debates than the identification of the skills themselves.
It is typical for managers, for example, to classify more skills as “necessary” than would be advisable and, therefore, it is necessary to conduct these workshops well so that everyone is aware of what will be worked on in the training, but always within a context pragmatically feasible and real, not projecting something idealized and difficult to execute.
