Workforce and future skills
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8 min read
Key findings
A former Police Scotland employee, quoted by Edwards, found 36,000 skills profiles, none of which seemed relevant to the actual work.
Sparkman recommends piloting a skills inventory on one critical workforce segment, because most roles need several skills and assessment takes resources.
In SHRM's 2026 survey of 2,094 US HR professionals, 41 per cent trained existing employees for hard-to-fill roles.
Deployment and succession decisions should rest on demonstrated proficiency, which means a work product or record exists.
Inferred skills stay in the asserted tier until a person who has seen the work confirms them.
A skills listing for police officers included baking and two levels of basketball.
A skills inventory records which skills an organisation holds, at what level of proficiency, and on what evidence.
Build one by naming the decision it serves, choosing one capability family, listing its tasks, defining proficiency by what can be observed, and recording who confirmed each rating.
Most inventories begin with a long list of skills and a request for self-ratings, and the work the skills are for comes last.
The sequence below starts from the decision and the work behind it, and ends with a sourcing recommendation that a business leader can fund.
What A Skills Inventory Holds
An inventory lists people against skills, with a proficiency level and the evidence for each rating.
Four neighbouring documents are often confused with it.
A skills taxonomy is the shared vocabulary, with a name and definition for each skill
A role profile states which skills a role needs, and at what level
A skills matrix is a grid view of the inventory for one team
A skills gap analysis compares the inventory with the role profiles
A competency is a different unit, a cluster of behaviour such as influencing without authority that shows up across situations.
Competencies carry selection, promotion and development conversations, and skills carry deployment, sourcing and workforce planning.
Merging them puts influencing beside Python on one list, and managers cannot rate the two in the same way.
The competency side is covered in rebuilding a competency framework.
Start With The Decision
Skills data gets collected for five purposes, and each needs a different level of detail.
Workforce planning needs coarse capability families
Deployment needs precision on a small set
Development needs a gap against a target role
Hiring needs the requirements of the open role
Succession needs evidence against named positions
An inventory that serves all five from one list serves none, because the detail that suits deployment makes planning unreadable.
The first question for the sponsor is therefore which decision the organisation cannot currently make.
Where nobody knows who can do a critical piece of work, the project is a deployment problem in one family.
Where the plan requires capabilities the organisation lacks, it is a planning problem at a coarse grain.
Where there is no answer, the request is an aspiration, and saying so is cheaper than building the inventory.
SHRM published its 2026 Talent Trends report on 27 April 2026, from a survey of 2,094 US HR professionals with unweighted data.
It found that 41 per cent of HR professionals train existing employees for hard-to-fill roles.
It also reports that job rotation was rated highly effective by 93 per cent, while fewer than 25 per cent of HR professionals use it.
Both practices depend on knowing who can already do what, and the release gives no figure on how many organisations hold a skills inventory.
Job rotation as a way to close talent gaps is covered separately.
Start With The Task
A skills listing for police officers included baking and two levels of basketball, according to Jen Allen, formerly of Police Scotland, quoted by Edwards.
She had found 36,000 skills profiles, none of which seemed relevant to the actual work.
Her instruction to the learning team was to start with demand and start with the task.
Skills defined away from the work produce a list that is long, unmaintainable and impossible to act on.
The better sequence identifies the work the family has to deliver over the next two years, lists the tasks that work contains, and names the capabilities each task needs.
Every capability on a role's list should trace to a task that role performs.
Scoping The First Inventory
Sparkman advises a pilot on a critical workforce segment, because most roles need several skills and the assessment takes real time.
Take one capability family in one part of the business where a decision depends on it.
Aerospace engineering at one site, underwriting in one line and data engineering in the product group are examples.
Within that scope the questions are tractable, namely what work is coming, what it requires, who does it now, at what level of proof, and what the shortfall is.
The output is a sourcing decision, which is build, buy, borrow or automate, with a cost against each.
The same logic applies when hiring is closed, as described in workforce planning during a hiring freeze.
Observable Proficiency Levels
Proficiency scales fail when the levels are adjectives, because advanced means different things to different managers.
Define each level by what the person produces.
Awareness. Describes the work and needs guidance on each case
Working. Completes routine cases alone and asks for help on complex ones
Proficient. Completes complex cases alone and reviews the work of others
Expert. Sets the standard, handles novel cases and teaches others
For each family, replace those descriptions with named work products.
The evidence rule then states what a manager must have seen before scoring someone a 3.
One workable rule requires a named work product or observed case from the last twelve months, confirmed by a person who reviewed it.
Three Tiers Of Evidence
Self-ratings have a use, and they should be labelled for what they are.
Asserted. The person says they have the skill
Attested. A manager or peer confirms it
Demonstrated. A work product or record exists
Deployment and succession decisions should rest on the third tier, and planning can tolerate the first.
Sparkman describes two surveys for a pilot, one completed by the manager and one by the employee, on the same scale.
He compares them to reveal gaps between perception and performance, and in his worked example he averages the two into one proficiency percentage.
Keeping the two ratings in separate columns keeps more information, because a large difference between them is itself a finding.
Recording the tier beside every rating stops an asserted claim being used later as though it were demonstrated.
Where nobody knows who can do a critical piece of work, the project is a deployment problem in one family.
Collecting And Keeping Current
Skills data decays, because people learn, forget, change roles and see their work change.
An inventory that nobody maintains misleads, since decisions get taken from it on the assumption that it is current.
Three methods survive in practice.
Collect at natural moments. Project close, role change, appraisal and certification renewal produce accurate data because something has just happened
Keep the set small enough to refresh. A hundred current skills are worth more than two thousand stale ones
Give each family an owner in the business. The capability lead uses the data and notices when it is wrong, which the HR team will not
Each record carries a last-confirmed date, and anything past a set age shows as unconfirmed.
Employees should be able to see what is recorded about them, who confirmed it and how to correct it.
Where Inference Helps
Skills inference from CVs, project records and collaboration data is now standard in vendor demonstrations.
It drafts faster than manual entry, and the output belongs in the asserted tier until someone who has seen the work confirms it.
A tool that reads a project record and concludes that someone has stakeholder management has found a word.
Inference also reproduces whatever the source data over-represents.
People who write more, or who use the collaboration platform heavily, appear more skilled than people doing equivalent work in less instrumented parts of the business.
Where the inventory feeds deployment or progression, that bias reaches individuals, so decisions on promotion, pay or succession need a person who has seen the work.
What HR should and should not hand to a model is covered in AI in talent work.
Eight Weeks For One Family
Five roles carry the work.
They are the sponsor who owns the decision, the capability lead in the business, an HR business partner, an HR systems analyst and the line managers.
Week 1. The sponsor and the HR business partner agree the decision the inventory supports and choose the family
Week 2. The capability lead and two senior practitioners list the tasks the family will perform over the next two years
Week 3. The same group names the capabilities, writes the four level descriptions and fixes the evidence rule
Weeks 4 and 5. Line managers rate their people and attach evidence, and employees rate themselves on the same scale
Week 6. The HR systems analyst loads the records and the HR business partner compares them with next year's work
Week 7. The capability lead and a finance business partner cost each gap as build, buy, borrow or automate
Week 8. The sponsor receives the sourcing recommendation and names the owner of the next refresh
Judge the pilot by whether the sponsor made a sourcing decision from it.
A pilot that ends with a completed data structure and no decision has not yet earned an extension.
Template Entries
A working record for one family needs ten entries for each person and capability.
Employee and role
Capability, as named in the taxonomy
Required level for the role next year
Assessed level
Evidence tier
Evidence reference, such as a work product or certificate
Confirmed by
Last confirmed date
Gap against the requirement
Sourcing note for any gap
Each extra entry adds maintenance, so add one only when a decision needs it.
The record can live in a spreadsheet, an HR system or a skills platform, and the analysis survives a change of technology.
A Purchased Taxonomy
Practitioners often inherit a purchased taxonomy with thousands of entries already loaded.
Deleting it is rarely an option, and three moves make it usable.
Select the subset that maps to one capability family
Write the proficiency descriptors in house, because purchased ones are generic
Record the evidence tier beside every claim
The platform will not record the tier on its own.
The rest of the taxonomy can sit unused, provided no decision is taken from it.
Where the enterprise insists on a framework, agree the first use case before the architecture, and pilot on one family with real decisions attached.
Job Architecture Underneath
Skills work exposes a problem one level down.
Two units call the same work by different titles, and three titles cover work that differs only by seniority.
No inventory repairs that, and every inventory inherits it.
List the titles in one family, group them by the work rather than the grade, and name the levels that differ in accountability.
The cheap version takes a fortnight, and job architecture before pay bands covers the full version.
Where The Tools Sit
In Trusted Talent Advisor, the capability architecture and future skills work sits in component 01, The Core Practitioner Guide.
The diagnostic lenses there separate a capability gap from a conditions problem.
The Talent Template Pack includes the capability gap analysis and the future skills planner.
Sources
1. Edwards, D. The Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook: Design, Implement and Measure Workforce Plans to Drive Business Results. Kogan Page.
2. Sparkman, R. Strategic Workforce Planning: Developing Optimized Talent Strategies for Future Growth. Kogan Page.
3. Society for Human Resource Management. 2026 Talent Trends report, press release of 27 April 2026. SHRM.
From the system
Trusted Talent Advisor sets out the full method: seven components, 51 tools, The Talent Template Pack and The Prompt Library.
See the system
Questions this answers
What is a skills inventory?
A skills inventory is a record of which skills an organisation holds, at what level of proficiency, and on what evidence. It is most useful when scoped to one capability family and attached to a decision.
How do you create a skills inventory for employees?
Name the decision it serves, choose one capability family, list the tasks, define four proficiency levels by observable output, set an evidence rule, then have managers and employees rate. Cost each gap as build, buy, borrow or automate.
What is the difference between a skills inventory and a skills taxonomy?
A taxonomy is the shared vocabulary, with a name and definition for each skill. An inventory records who holds those skills, at what level and on what evidence, so that it can support a decision.
What is the difference between a skills inventory and a skills matrix?
A skills matrix is a grid view of the inventory for one team, showing people against skills. The inventory holds the underlying records, with evidence tier, who confirmed each rating and when, across more than one team.
How do you keep a skills inventory up to date?
Collect at natural moments such as project close, role change, appraisal and certification renewal. Keep the set small enough to refresh, give each family a business owner, and show any record past a set age as unconfirmed.
How accurate are employee self-assessed skills?
Self-ratings are acceptable for coarse planning and unsafe for deployment or succession. Ask the manager to rate the same skills, keep both ratings in separate columns, and treat a large difference between them as the finding.
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