Finding your hidden talent can be the key to helping boost productivity and create truly engaged employees. Last month on The Experience Expert, Julie Develin, Sr. Partner, HCM Advisory & Human Insights, explored the importance of your employees’ career growth. To find hidden talents, organizations must mine for skills internally, and it’s not only the employees who need to provide the skills, but leaders must also grow and mentor those employees. Julie provides insight into several ways to help develop employee careers, including feedback, job rotation, job enlarging, mentoring, and more. And while it takes a whole team of leaders, HR professionals can help foster and support growth by engaging in conversations.
Now, we don’t want to give too much away before you watch the on-demand replay, but we will explore some ways you can use your UKG Ready® solution to take the insights from Julie and put them into practice.
Skills Tracking
Julie speaks about the new option within the traditional skills matrix, mining for skills. It’s important to keep a pulse on your employees' skills and where there may be gaps. This can help you determine how to then develop those skills. The UKG Ready solution offers the option to track skills tied to an employee or applicant. Creating your skills in UKG Ready is simple. Navigate to Settings > HR Setup > Skills. Once the skills are created, they can be assigned to employees through their Employee Profile or as part of the defaults in their job or position when using Position Management. These skills can also be used within the application process, performance reviews, and scheduling*.
*Your organization must own the Recruitment, Performance, or Advanced Scheduling module to use in these instances.
Training and Certification Completion
Like employee skills, tracking training and certification completion is another key way to help determine how to nurture conversations of growth. Some roles may require specific training areas or certification completion as minimum knowledge and experience. Tracking those items on your employee’s profile can help you know whether those requirements are being met, as well as expiration dates. You can configure your training course and certification details in your UKG Ready solution under Settings > HR Setup > Courses/Certifications. From there, add details that align with your courses and certification, including the renewal period, which helps you track toward expiration. Notifications can then be set up to notify your employees when the expiration happens.
UKG Ready Learning
Speaking of training completion, let’s take a step back and focus on what is needed to get to the tracking process, completing actual courses. Employees who crave career growth thrive on the opportunity to learn. In the most recent Experience Expert, Julie shared a statistic from Employ. The 2023 Job Seekers Report stated that 75% of workers would be more satisfied if they had the opportunity to learn more skills on the job. Training and development can come from opportunities such as training courses and curriculum and On-the-Job (OTJ) training. The UKG Ready Learning module provides a learning management system to help engage your employees and align compliance, training, and development efforts. With UKG Ready Learning, you can create courses, build those courses into a curriculum, and provide other learning and training materials for your employees. Additionally, course completion can be reflected in the Training/Certification report on the employee’s profile.
Performance and Succession Planning
Performance reviews are an excellent tool to help drive career growth conversations, but they’re only part of performance development. Performance management comes in all shapes and forms, including goals, coaching and development, and succession planning. Having a clear development plan can help aid career conversations. To help managers provide constructive and inspiring conversations, consider using a 360 Feedback review process. Gathering information and feedback from multiple perspectives allows employees to gain insight into their strengths and areas of opportunity. The UKG Ready solution features several performance offerings, including Performance Reviews and Succession Planning tools. Managers can execute Performance Reviews for their employees within the system. This consists of both employee and manager contributions as well as peer feedback. Taking the performance development process to the next level, managers can use Succession Plans and nine-box matrices to help streamline their Succession Planning and development.
Recruitment
The emphasis on mining employee skills and finding hidden talent within your organization will help increase employee engagement and productivity. When employees see other employees being promoted or expanding their opportunities, it helps them recognize that leadership supports a culture of growth. Promoting from within shows your investment and opens employees' eyes to growth opportunities, which keeps them engaged and helps with retention. As you’re opening new positions, consider looking within first. Using functionality in the Job Requisition configuration, you can set the Job Type as Internal and then select a date for the job to be posted externally allowing your employees to be considered for a role first.
Review the HR User Guides under My Info > Help > Online Documentation to learn more about these features and how to configure them. Don’t forget to catch the on-demand replay of The Experience Expert: Fueling Employee Growth and Success to dive deeper into valuable and actionable insights.