We’re proud to announce the launch of viSkills Wave version!
viSkills is a powerful tool that manages your firm’s skills taxonomy while providing visibility into the skills, talents, and competencies within your firm.
What’s New in the Wave Version?
Wave is a complete overhaul of viSkills, redesigned and rebuilt from the bottom up.
This next generation skill management solution comes with a host of brand-new enhancements.
Some of our favorites include:
- New admin dashboard, with improved analytics and visibility into your workforce’s skills
- More intuitive, time-saving UI and UX
- Improved system speed and performance
Book a live demo to see these new enhancements in action.
Why is tracking and understanding employee skills important?
Two very important reasons:1. To strengthen firm competencies and contribute to firm growth
Skills tracking is a growing part of law firm talent management. Many firms are formalizing their skill libraries and standardizing the skills each associate level and practice group needs to advance. Successful firms are cultivating workforces that can rapidly grow and continuously develop their skill set. The goal is to build a resilient and adaptable talent team that can respond to the ever-changing legal landscape.2. To take resource allocation to the next level
Resource allocation focuses on an associate’s availability and utilization, while skills tracking ensures each lawyer’s skills, experiences, and interests are considered when assigning work. It ensures work is being done by the best available lawyer while keeping all associates on track in their individual development paths.By better understanding the capabilities of their workforce, firms can reassess their talent to close workforce gaps and meet evolving needs. All of this is part of a skills-based talent management strategy.
What is skills-based talent management?
Skills-based talent management is an approach to people management that places skills at the core of an organization’s strategies. Less emphasis is placed on roles or job titles, and instead, firms operate around the competencies and capabilities of the workforce.Rather than job holders, employees are viewed as people with a collection of skills that can be applied in different parts of the organization. Skills-based talent strategies embrace a worker-centric mentality — employees are given agency and opportunity to use and grow their skills based on interest. Employees are recognized for their capabilities and rewarded accordingly.
Skills become the framework for all HR-decision making, informing the way firms hire their employees, develop their talent and allocate their work. The whole organization shifts to prioritize lifelong growth and evolution. While many HR processes were built for more stable environments, a skills-based approach recognizes today’s need for speed and flexibility.
Where do you start? By creating a Skills Taxonomy.
What is a Skills Taxonomy?
A skills taxonomy, sometimes referred to as “a skills matrix,” “a skill library,” or “a skills database” is a method of tracking which skills an individual or group of individuals has. It can include hard or soft skills, certifications, diplomas and can decide the degree of competency within each.Much like a branched flow chart or a family tree, a skills taxonomy can group multiple specific skillsets beneath a broader skill. For example, a broad skill like “communication” can be broken down into “written communication,” “verbal communication” and “client communication.” These can be broken down further into subsets such as “clarity,” “conciseness,” “grammar and spelling” and preparedness,” to name a few.
How do you use a Skills Taxonomy?
When you know what kind of skills exist within your firm, and who has which, the possibilities are incredible:
- Create project teams that best complement each other, while leaving no surprise skill gaps
- Tailor work assignments to better develop budding talent and round out your subject matter experts
- Foster informal mentoring by teaming up subject matter experts with novices
- Improve employee retention rates by developing their skillsets and enabling them to mobilize within your firm
- Build competitive advantage by maximizing your people’s potential
- Hire and recruit people with the exact skills needed to fill existing gaps
- Plan out individual career paths by identifying specific skillsets and competencies they will need to advance to their ideal position
A skills taxonomy can be incorporated into all your HR practices — learning and development, hiring, work allocation, performance management and even compensation.
How viSkills Can Help
With its powerful reporting and dashboard features, viSkills can house your firm’s skill taxonomy and bring to light the data most important to you. Start from the top with a firm-wide view of skill data that can be filtered down by department, office, or practice group, to see what collective skills and experience your firm has. Identify any ability gaps among teams or departments (or maybe your firm) and plan your talent management strategies accordingly.
Pre-loaded with suggested skills for the legal profession, viSkills can also help you create “ideal” skill profiles for each position at your firm. This enables you and your people to know where they stand in relation to where they want to be, and plan how to get there. These “ideal skill profiles” can also be used to aid in hiring and evaluating any potential candidates.
Flexible to fit your firm, viSkills can be customized to report on various levels of skill competency. Human resources can own the entire competency evaluation process to dictate each person’s capabilities, or each employee can self-evaluate and note their skills within the platform.
viSkills seamlessly integrates with viResourceAllocation, allowing the skill data it stores to be referenced when work is being assigned and when annual evaluations are being written.
We hope you’re as excited as we are about the possibilities viSkills can bring to your firm!
Learn more about viSkills, or any of our other products, by requesting a demo: