Overview:

The Strategic Innovation Group Team created a functional Talent Management Tool (T³) prototype in AWS utilizing JDSAT data. The team prioritized their efforts through focusing on answering the following business problem:  

Many organizations claim their personnel are their most valued asset.  As part of normal business processes these organizations build a level of understanding about the knowledge, skills, and abilities of their employees; however, few organizations are fully utilizing this information to manage the valuable talent they employ. 

The tool created through the SIG provides any organization an intuitive platform to understand their workforce in a way which maximizes work alignment to individual skills and abilities, tracks and organizes professional development activities to support career progression, and recognizes critical skill gaps across an enterprise.

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Method:

To extract actionable insights, the SIG team implemented an efficient data workflow to provide a comprehensive talent inventory analysis. Data for the tool was compiled from two sources: 1) employee data and2) skills taxonomy. The tool extracted and compiled key data for each employee such as an employee’s position, position description, work experience, and career accomplishments. The tool utilized a robust skills taxonomy which grouped over 15,000 skills into three different categories: business, technical, and creative. Each category of skills was further dissected into four different levels – with each driving to a deeper level of specificity for each skill. Natural language processing techniques were applied across the employee data and the skills taxonomy to pair employees’ education and experience to individual skills, and upload the data to an AWS RDS instance. The team then utilized AWS QuickSight to construct a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to interact with the database to allow users the opportunity to review employee’s skills and abilities, aggregate groups of employees based on skill category, and update employee skills as they progress throughout their careers.

Results:

T³ provides a solution to supporting workforce development which utilizes common data sources and presents the information in a digestible and usable manner for maximum use by decision-makers. The tool enables managers and senior leadership with the capacity to answer critical questions of its workforce such as:

-What are the most/least common skills found inside the organization?

-Where are the knowledge and skills gaps across the workforce?

-Where should the organization target professional development opportunities to upskill the workforce?

-Who in the organization is best aligned to support specific project requirements?

Harnessing the power of data and analytics, the SIG delivered a talent tracking and management capability to maximize workforce development and skill alignment across any organization.

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