Peter L. Lim

Any chance of an economic recovery in 2001

Knowing what skills your people have and what they need is an essential part of any upskilling and reskilling strategy. According to Bridge-sponsored research, it's never been more important, as 77 percent of HR professionals and business leaders consider talent development a top priority over the next two years. However, despite talent development’s importance, survey ﬁndings also reveal that less than half of HR teams currently match learning to future talent requirements or assess employee needs and gaps in knowledge.Let’s take a look at how developing a skills matrix can keep your talent management strategy in step with learner needs and business demands, as well as how to use AI-powered upskilling software to personalize your L&D programs.What Is a Skills Matrix?Think of a skills matrix as an inventory of your employees’ current abilities. By evaluating these skills and competencies and presenting them in a table, you can easily monitor skills gaps, ﬁnd your strongest performers, and ensure your people are equipped to undertake a project or succeed in their roles.A skills matrix is useful for quickly identifying and comparing people’s competencies and experience, allocating resources, and targeting L&D programs.The Beneﬁts of Using a Skills MatrixSome of the beneﬁts of a skills matrix include:1. Finding and Filling Employee Skills GapsKnowing what skills are required to drive organizational success means you can organize your talent and prioritize training programs based on demand.Mapping your workforce’s skills, capabilities, and experience levels makes it easy to spot any skills gaps across teams or departments, and then direct them toward learning and development opportunities they need.2. Assessing Employee PerformanceConnecting the work your people do to organizational objectives with a set of measurable goals reveals your strongest performers and the capabilities that drive organizational success.A robust skills framework can help your people understand what’s expected of them, showing them the areas in which they make the most impact and providing actionable steps for improvement.3. Incentivizing Learning and DevelopmentBeyond delivering mandatory training, a skills matrix can help identify employees’ strengths and career goals and connect them to meaningful learning opportunities. When your employees develop and grow, everyone beneﬁts. LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report ﬁndings show that people are four times more likely to engage in training when it’s connected to their career goals. And 87 percent of L&D pros say they show business value by helping employees gain skills to move into different internal roles.4. Workforce Planning and Risk MitigationAssigning tasks is easy when it’s clear who possesses the needed skills and competencies and who’s most experienced to undertake projects. With a view of skillsets across the organization, you can mobilize talent most effectively and tap into otherwise hidden potential. Additionally, you can guard against future disruption and anticipate changing needs by identifying high-potential talent who can step into business-critical roles and prioritize training programs for in-demand skills.How to Build an Employee Skills MatrixAssessing employees at scale requires a system for collecting, categorizing, and organizing these skills. Follow the steps below to build a skills matrix for your organization.Step One: Identify the Required SkillsWhether your matrix is focused across a team, department, or the entire organization, you must be clear about the essential skills each person needs to perform in their role.Start by compiling these skills and competencies with leaders and key stakeholders across departments, including both soft and hard, or role-speciﬁc. You could also review your company’s competency framework to identify core values and behaviors that your people should possess—but remember to keep the list speciﬁc and only include what’s relevant.It’s likely that some of these skills and competencies will be the same for everybody in the organization, while others will be more technical and role-speciﬁc.Step Two: Create a Scoring System to Evaluate SkillsOnce you’ve gathered a list of skills and competencies, you’ll need a way to rank and categorize proﬁciency and map it onto your matrix.A popular way to score and manage skills mastery is using a Likert scale. For example:ScoreRatingDescription1LimitedThe employee has limited knowledge or understanding of the skill or hasn’t yet had the chance to apply it.2BasicThe employee demonstrates the essential components of the competency or skill with the ability to develop a greater competency in a reasonable timeframe.3WorkingThe employee demonstrates experience using the skill at a necessary level to advance organizational objectives.4SeasonedThe employee effectively applies the skill in practice in most circumstances.5ExpertThe employee specializes in this area, showing consistent, superior application of the skill, even in unanticipated circumstances.For an accurate picture of employee proﬁciency, consider collecting and combining several sources of data, such as: Skills assessments Manager and peer reviews Employee self-evaluationsStep Three: Consider Employees’ Career GoalsAlthough including employees’ career goals and the skills they want to develop is optional, doing so can inform development plans and direct people to meaningful L&D opportunities.To uncover this insight, partner with your people managers. By making career and skills development a staple of regular manager-employee discussions, you’ll understand what motivates people and what skills they want to learn. You can use this insight to ﬁnd opportunities that develop these skills aligned with organizational goals.Step Four: Compile Skills Data in a TableAn Excel spreadsheet is a popular format for mapping skills data, and this sheet will give you a visualization of each employee’s proﬁciency level.You’ll plot this information using two axes, with employee names on one and a list of skills on the other. Then, you’ll populate the sheet using the data you’ve collected.Once you’ve built your matrix, you’ll have an overview of each person’s abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. You can sort these skills into categories based on tasks and projects, ﬁlter to ﬁnd gaps, and use them to inform employee development plans.Step Five: Keep Skills Matrices Up to DateUp-to-date skills data is a must for tracking growth over time and prioritizing skills needs. To get the most out of a skills matrix, you’ll need to review and update your data regularly to reﬂect your people’s current skills, proﬁciencies, and certiﬁcations.How Dedicated Employee Upskilling Software Can Streamline Skills AssessmentsHere are some ways an all-in-one learning, development, and upskilling platform like Bridge streamlines creating and managing your skills matrix and keeps your data accurate and up to date.1. Creating a Single Source of Truth for Employee SkillsA dynamic skills taxonomy is the foundation of any skills strategy. However, gathering data to present an in-the-moment picture of your people’s skills takes time, and skills inventories quickly become outdated as employees continue to learn and grow.An LMS allows you to swiftly identify, group, and measure the skills within your organization, giving you a transparent and agile framework from which to build.Using a learning, development, and upskilling platform with AI to combine your existing employee data with external labor market data gives you an accurate, ever-evolving, and easy-to-visualize view of competitive in-demand skills and where they exist in your organization.2. Assessing Employee Skills and CompetenciesOnce you know what skills your people have and what’s required, you’ll need a way to ﬁll any gaps with training and development and measure learner growth.An L&D platform gives you a single destination to conduct performance conversations, record employee one-on-ones, and share skills feedback and recognition. With AI, you can take this a step further by helping people identify the skills they need to grow and recommending competencies based on their roles.3. Personalizing Employee DevelopmentMapping skills using an AI-driven taxonomy keeps learning targeted andgrowth-oriented with minimal administrative input. Once learners know what they want to develop, you make their growth actionable and measurable by connecting them to employee development plans and assigning tasks and training.However, formal training programs are only one way to strengthen your talent pool and close skills gaps. You can also harness these skills and insights and direct learners toward gigs, projects, and mentorship opportunities that put these skills into practice.

How to Create an Effective Skills Matrix With the Help of AI-Based Skills Suggestions

In January, OpenAI’s conversational platform, ChatGPT-3, became the fastest-growing app in internet history. This is just one indication of growing curiosity about GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) and other chatbots in the past few weeks. As one of the first learning professionals to see the potential of conversational AI and one of the few designing the applications for years, I’m excited to see the recent attention paid to this engaging technology.In my book, AI in Talent Development, I outline several ways chatbots can be used as part of a robust learning experience, and ChatGPT-3, the third version in OpenAI’s ChatGPT series, demonstrates most of them. When ATD asked me to write a post on this subject, I struggled to find the value I could add to the exploding conversation. I decided to do what people say I do best: Give you the bottom line and point the way towards practical applications. Let’s start with the basics.How ChatGPT-3 WorksChatGPT operates on an autoregressive model. It’s not as complicated as it may sound. A transformer is a program, model, or algorithm that converts code into something else—in this case, human language. The autoregressive part means the software uses prior events to predict the most likely future events, which is what your brain does all the time. It allows ChatGPT and similar applications to simulate a conversation between two humans. Learn the two keys to making an application like this work:1. Natural Language ProgrammingNatural Language Processing (NLP) allows the bot to recognize input through human speech or writing, eliminating the need for menus or code to engage with it. This same ability enables the bot to reply through text. Before the development of NLP, most chatbots were menu-driven, and the bot responded by selecting the best fit from a database of pre-written options. Conversational AI represents a new way for humans to use computers; it’s a user interface requiring less hardware and prior knowledge than any previous UIs.!CAUTION! Don’t confuse Natural Language Processing with the pseudo-science term using the same acronym. Neural Linguistic Programming is widely disproved and an invalid practice.2. Massive Training DatasetsLike any neural network (including your own), AI models must be effectively trained using a technique called deep learning. Quite frankly, the stunning capabilities of ChatGPT-3 are nothing new. As David Chalmers points out, there is no new technology here. There are many bots with similar abilities, and I described them in detail in 2020. How this bot is trained and how well this approach works is innovative. First, Open AI used the largest training dataset, combining a database containing much of the internet, a huge library of books, and Wikipedia.Then, after refining the bot in-house, Open AI released it free to the world. As we all started to play with it, we were training it further for them. Think of it as a crowd-sourced training effort. The sheer size of the training database resulted in what everyone always expected: Impressive results that can mimic human expression so well it is hard to tell a machine generated it. However, there continues to be an underlying problem: Chatbots are only as good as their training (like us humans). If you consider the source of GPT’s training, you can see why it sometimes makes mistakes.What Can We Do With ChatGPT-3?Because this product is still being explored, there may be new use cases by the time this post publishes. Below are a few applications that can save time and make your work as a learning professional more efficient and productive.Write ContentIf you ask the bot to write a paragraph introducing a subject, it comes back almost instantly with plausible, grammatically correct text. Because its training included unvalidated sources like the internet and Wikipedia, some of the content it produces must be corrected. Still, you can get excellent first drafts and refine your content from there.Summarize DocumentsLooking for a “Reader’s Digest” version of a book or article? Paste the text into a prompt to ChatGPT, and it returns a nice summary that should hit most of the highlights.Write and Troubleshoot Computer CodeBecause ChatGPT was built to analyze and produce output in human language, it is also great at computer languages. Programmers are using it to troubleshoot code. It can even generate new code if you ask it to develop a new capability.Translate DocumentsFar more effective than other translators out there, ChatGPT can take a website or article and translate it into another language.Write and Grade QuizzesYou can feed your content into GPT and ask it to generate a quiz with answers. Or, give it a general subject, like world history, and it will do the same. Feed your student’s quiz responses into GPT, and it will grade them (even essays!).Create GamesI asked GPT to create a game teaching sixth-grade students about the solar system, and the bot came back with a fun adventure through space.Improve Your WritingI didn’t do this for this article, but I could have asked GPT to review my draft and suggest improvements.Conduct ResearchI asked the bot to provide a list of current peer-reviewed studies on chatbot use in education using APA style and received a properly formatted list.Why Does ChatGPT Have Some People Worried?While most of the comments about GPT are positive, you will find a few educators deeply concerned about this new tool’s capabilities.Mimicking Human WritingTeachers are worried about GPT’s ability to write plausible text reading like a human created it and write in a known author’s style. A student could ask the bot to write a paper in the same style as one of their previous works, and it would be hard to tell the GPT paper wasn’t an original student effort. But, again, this mimicking ability is nothing new. AI has generated art in the style of great artists for years. ChatGPT applies the same predictive approach to language.ChatGPT Makes MistakesAnother concern is the bot’s ability to present false information so convincingly that some users forget to validate the response with research. For example, I asked the bot to calculate the mean of five numbers, and the result was interesting. I received a detailed explanation of the statistical definition of “mean” and how to calculate it, which I did NOT request. However, the bot added the five numbers incorrectly.To be fair, ChatGPT wasn’t built to perform math problems. But it didn’t tell me that or report the result might be incorrect. Like any willing assistant, it did its best to provide an answer. If I had been a student relying on GPT’s help, I would have been wrong. The reason for most of these mistakes is the same reason that it is such a stunning improvement in the chatbot experience: It’s primary sources of information are the internet and Wikipedia.I asked Vince Han, one of the pioneers in building chatbots for learning, to sum up the challenges presented by GPT’s new capabilities, and here’s his response:“One of the effects of ChatGPT & increased quality in Artificial Intelligence in general is shifting the skills users need. For example, most users have developed a skill for how to search which is knowing how to craft keywords and how to sift through search results. Now, people will need the skill of discernment, or learning how to decipher truth and views from a chatbot that provides what reads like a definitive answer. So, from a performance support perspective, yes, one can now get an immediate response to a question but how accurate and relevant that response is will be up to them to determine. “As educators, we must now confront a problem that has been boiling for decades—the decline in critical thinking across most domains, demographics, and workgroups. In my opinion, ChatGPT makes this gap more visible and increases the urgency for closing it quickly.Closing ThoughtsBecause Microsoft owns the license for the exclusive use of the model, we’ve all been working for them, revealing exciting use cases that may find their way into AI-enabled Microsoft products. For now, the platform consists of both free and professional versions. It’s an excellent way to begin learning about the promise of AI and our place alongside it. As machine learning expert Santiago Pino says, “AI will not replace you. A person using AI will.”Where Can You Learn More?There are so many articles about this subject right now that I’ve limited myself to a few favorites:Under the Hood of Chat GPT With Myra RoldanHow ChatGPT3 Impacts the Future of L&D in an AI WorldChatGPT Has Educators Scrambling to Keep UpWhat Is ChatGPT and How to Teach With ItWhat Is ChatGPT and Why Does It Matter?What Is ChatGPT? Is It the Beginning of the End?Ger’s Learning Notes #51 - ChatGPTFor more information and resources, Check out ATD's AI Resource page.