5 Tips to Evaluate Future Skills Using Talent Assessments

5 Tips to Evaluate Future Skills Using Talent Assessments
June 15, 2023 7 mins

5 Tips to Evaluate Future Skills Using Talent Assessments

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In a constantly evolving business landscape, talent assessments can help organizations understand current and future skills gaps in their workforces.

Key Takeaways
  1. Organizations can assess their existing workforce for core capabilities that indicate readiness to learn future skills.
  2. Another important skill to assess is resilience, which allows employees to cope with change.
  3. An inclusive mindset, which enables inclusion and diversity, helps to boost wellbeing and belonging in the workforce.

Future skills planning is a top priority for talent professionals and leaders across all organizations. We work with clients that are increasingly asking core questions like: What skills do I need right now and in the future? What is the potential and skills that exist within my current workforce? How can I bridge the gap between the skills required today and tomorrow? While future skills planning involves many areas, one secret weapon that we see underutilized by businesses is the use of talent assessments to uncover the skills and aptitude among current workforces.

With the right assessments, an organization can optimize its talent strategy and hire and develop those equipped to embrace change, adapt to the future and thrive in uncertainty. Rather than automatically hiring new candidates with desired skills, current employees are often a great source of untapped potential.

Tip #1: Use a Tried and Tested Model for Digital Readiness

Agility, learnability and curiosity are factors of digital readiness — and digital readiness is an indicator of the ability to learn future skills. It enables people to navigate through the digital world of work successfully and feel comfortable with technology. Digital readiness includes:

  • The willingness and ability to learn and seek new development opportunities
  • Adapting flexibly to an ever-changing work environment
  • An openness to try new things
Tip #2: Assess Your Existing Workforce for Digital Readiness

Based on four years of data from Aon’s talent assessments (including 48 million assessments), we find that digital readiness is equally represented across genders, but more prevalent in workers aged 50 and above and with senior managers.

Do you know which roles in your organization are at greatest risk of automation? This group is a good place to start as they will need reskilling or upskilling. It is useful to understand the potential for change and learning what capabilities individuals have to offer.

Aon’s Digital Readiness Model can be used to understand the digital competencies of individuals, teams or the entire employee population. Individual high scorers can be spotted and moved into positions of influence. An audit of teams or larger workforce groups shows how the current workforce stacks up against future skills to identify skills gaps and plan how these might be filled.

Tip #3: Assess Talent for Resilience

Your organization is only as resilient as its people. Resilience is an indicator of how adaptable, stress-resistant and motivated people are in a workforce. Understanding and closing gaps of resilience for individuals, teams and organizations help realize potential and improve bottom line performance for the long term.

Resilience can be assessed using Aon’s Human Sustainability Index (HSI) on an individual, team and organization-wide basis. HSI is inclusive and scalable, allowing you to target interventions in an impactful and cost-effective way.

50

Assessment scores showing digital readiness are higher on average for workers aged 50 and above.

Source: Aon analysis of 48 million assessments from 2019-2022

Tip #4: Assess Talent for an Inclusive Mindset

An inclusive mindset builds and maintains relationships and values and respects different perspectives. Collectively, it can support the wellbeing of all employees. Our research finds older workers lead the way when adopting an inclusive mindset: All age groups over 40 years score higher than those under 40. Employers should see whether data in their own organization show patterns relevant to certain demographics or job functions. This information can help them build and boost inclusivity among the entire workforce.

Organizations can support diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) goals by identifying those employees with a strong inclusive mindset and involving them in special projects or moving them into a position of influence. New hires can also be assessed in order to understand how much of a driver or enabler they can be for inclusion and diversity strategies.

Tip #5: Assess for Timeless Soft Skills

People bring more than just skills and experience with them to work. They bring their personality and all the preferences, tendencies and styles that come with it. Our research shows that four out of the top five most-needed skills are soft skills. This number has remained stable over the last four years. Soft skills include communicating with impact, creating emotional attachment, driving results and taking initiative. Personality assessments, such as Aon’s ADEPT-15®, can uncover the unique aspects of an individual’s personality to identify these skills.

To learn more about how organizations can leverage assessments and trends we uncovered from our four-year study, please download Aon’s: A Guide to Making Better People Decisions With Talent Assessment.

40

Workers over 40 years old score higher, on average, for an inclusive mindset than those under 40.

Source: Aon analysis of 48 million assessments from 2019-2022

General Disclaimer

The information contained herein and the statements expressed are of a general nature and are not intended to address the circumstances of any particular individual or entity. Although we endeavor to provide accurate and timely information and use sources we consider reliable, there can be no guarantee that such information is accurate as of the date it is received or that it will continue to be accurate in the future. No one should act on such information without appropriate professional advice after a thorough examination of the particular situation.

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