MyKnowledgeMap

West Lothian Council SkillsGap

Client: West Lothian Council

Date of Implementation: May 2003

Primary Aim: To improve the effectiveness of the council’s staff by implementing an easy-to-use system that analyses skills gaps within the organisation, within specific departments and down to the individual and presents an opportunity to close these gaps. This has now moved on to using the system to improve customer facing skills across the organisation in order to obtain a ‘Charter Mark’ for the council as a whole—somethign which several of their departments have already been awarded.

Key Challenges: As West Lothian Council already had an established HR system in place (PRPDP), MyKnowledgeMap had to create a skills gap system that would run alongside this existing one and share data with it.

The Skills gap system would also have to encapsulate a huge variety of different job roles and responsibilities.

Solution: MKM developed a self-contained and easy-to-use system, which was introduced through a series of induction workshops carried out by MKM staff. The Skills Gap Analysis which was developed is in effect an online profiling tool, designed to identify specific competencies and knowledge areas (with both hard and soft skills) which are important for each job role, and to direct each individual to the appropriate development opportunities. A Portfolio section was also added where employees are encouraged to provide evidence of how they have improved a knowledge or skill area, in order that that their team leaders as well as the individuals could track progress. This system was called ‘The Manager’s Knowledge Map’.

Post implementation evaluation:

• The Skills Gap System has been live since May 2003. It is about to be rolled out to large parts of the organisation. No major systems usage problems have been encountered as thorough training was given and it is a very user-friendly system
• The original model was based around two knowledge maps, one for the hard skills required, called Competencies, and the other for the soft skills required, called Core Skills. The system is now being introduced to many of the operational departments and non-managers within the organisation with the facility to construct some knowledge maps which addressed and assessed specific skills for particular groups of people, eg, a customer service department or a social policy unit. This sub-system has now been built and implemented and interfaces seamlessly with the original system. This recent enhancement will save West Lothian Council unnecessary development and administration costs when they want to change an area and will enable them to change and amend operational knowledge maps within the system in line with operational requirements without having to refer to MyKnowledgeMap
• The method of self-evaluation within the skills knowledge map has now been altered for the soft skills element, changing the original 1-5 numerical evaluation of their skills into a sliding scale word evaluation. This encourages a more honest and accurate answer as the order is varied so that there isn’t such a “right” and “wrong” answer for each question. It has also proved to be a positive adaptation given that on the whole, people are occasionally uncomfortable assessing their soft skills, such as teamwork, on a 1-5 basis.