Maximize Workforce Efficiency: Using KnowledgeSmart to Identify Skill Gaps

Every construction and manufacturing business is unique. Your company has its own strategic goals, and only your company’s leadership can determine which skills are most important to support those goals. But once you’ve established a rubric for the competencies that your workers need most, the next step is to make sure that your people are set up to succeed—whether that’s your current employees, or prospective new hires.

There are plenty of ways to identify skill gaps within your organization, and different methods will suit different businesses best. But at its core, the process boils down to three essential stages: identifying which skills are priorities for your company; assessing your workforce’s current skill set; and then pinpointing any mismatches between the two. It makes sense, then, that the greater the detail with which you can gauge each of these, the more efficiently you’ll be able to resolve any gaps you find.

KnowledgeSmart, Eagle Point’s skill assessment tool, offers you the in-depth detail and analytical capabilities to both identify and build on your employees’ skills. Among today’s construction and manufacturing workforce, upskilling is one of the most popular benefits. If workers value training, then having the most impactful learning and development system you can sets you up to win—and retain—the highest level of talent for your business. Read on to learn how.

Dive deep on individuals’ skills

KnowledgeSmart is a skill assessment suite that integrates with Eagle Point’s Pinnacle Series LMS. It includes pre-built, customizable assessments that cover a wide range of important software titles for construction and manufacturing businesses—titles like Autodesk, BIM 360, Revit, and more. These assessments are accessible and quick, and can help you take a fine-grained look at your individual employees’ strengths and opportunities for improvement.

You can use KnowledgeSmart’s assessments as they are, edit elements of the assessment, or create your own. Then make them available to your team members to identify gaps—or deploy them as a part of your hiring process, to gauge candidates on the skills your organization needs most. Far from being only a tool to test a candidate’s qualifications, KnowledgeSmart assessments can also help you place a promising candidate on a relevant learning path as a part of their onboarding, so they can hit the ground running on their first day.

Identify trends across your workforce

An important part of determining how to address skill gaps in your workforce is understanding where those gaps are located. Your approach to training your people will depend on whether you’re training an individual, a team, or your whole organization. Fortunately, KnowledgeSmart can offer the insights to help you understand the shape of your workforce’s development needs.

KnowledgeSmart collects the results of your employees’ assessments and provides you with the analytical tools to visualize them, not just on an individual level, but collectively as well. You’ll be able to gain a high-level view of your team’s strengths and weaknesses, and from there, build individual training plans or design team learning opportunities.

Fold assessment results seamlessly into learning

Because KnowledgeSmart integrates with our Pinnacle Series LMS, skills assessments can flow directly into personalized learning paths. Each component of a skills assessment connects to a corresponding piece of training content, using a matching system that you can customize to fit your needs. When a worker completes an assessment, KnowledgeSmart can identify the content that corresponds to the worker’s strongest and weakest skills, and adjust the resulting course plan accordingly.

That way, employees who demonstrate their knowledge of a particular skill or tool don’t have to sit through courses that won’t benefit them. By the same token, KnowledgeSmart assessments can identify the specific content that will benefit an employee the most. And if there’s a lesson your team can’t miss, you can customize the learning path to make sure that, regardless of their assessment results, they won’t.

Track your workforce’s progress over time

The data visualization and analysis tools in KnowledgeSmart extend beyond the current moment. You can view historical data about your workforce, too, letting you see how many of your employees are using KnowledgeSmart, how often, and whether their assessment results are changing as they use it.

With that longitudinal information, you can evaluate the success of your learning and development plans. You’ll be able to see whether your employees’ targeted skills are improving, and how their training is affecting performance in related areas. You can even pull KnowledgeSmart data and cross-reference your training outcomes with company KPIs over time.

These analytics provide valuable insights into your business and your workforce. They can even help you make a business case for your learning and development strategy by highlighting the return on investment.

Upskilling is a benefit that employees want and businesses need. KnowledgeSmart delivers a personalized solution.

A rich learning management system signals to employees, both current and prospective, that your company places importance on their development goals. But without appropriately targeted content, your LMS can start to feel bloated, overwhelming, or intimidating for your employees. In short, it can start to feel like just one more chore, rather than an opportunity—for your leadership, as well as your employees.

At Eagle Point, we built the LMS that we wanted to use ourselves, and we have the expertise to help you get the most out of your investment in learning and development software. See for yourself the insights that KnowledgeSmart and Pinnacle Series can offer, and learn more about how we can support your company’s learning goals.

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