Making skills and feedback something you actually keep up to date

The problem

The BVN People and Culture team approached me with a need for a tool that could help them understand the skills, strengths and learning opportunities of their people. We used this opportunity to explore the problem and propose a solution that could be built on top of their internal company application.

At BVN, we asked the people how they felt about their skills, strengths and learning opportunities.

We found that because BVN didn’t have a tool in place that helped them understand their own skills:

• They didn’t know what skills they needed
• They didn’t know what areas they could do better
• People struggled to assess themselves
• Team leaders were affected as they didn’t have a way to give consistent feedback
• P&C team struggled to assign people to teams
• P&C team struggled to organise meaningful training

These issues were encapsulated with 3 user personas; which we used to play a significant part of our research.

We also identified a potential 4th persona. However, this was considered out of scope.

We identified 6 user needs, which would form up the goals of our solution.

• A tool to enable users to map their own skills
• Allow others to review and validate the user’s scoring of skills
• Allow users to view benchmarks of skills
• Allow users to plan their skills goals
• To enable resourcing team to build high-performing teams
• To enable resourcing team to understand skills gaps

💭 How might we map and communicate an employee’s skill level to highlight their unique skill sets and learning opportunities to better support project teams?

Before going deeper into the problem space, there were a few items that needed further consideration.

• Data Privacy — Who gets to see your data?
• Validating results — How do you validate the accuracy of your results?
• Rating or Score — What is the best way to measure your skills?
• Goals / Aspirations — How do you make sure you achieve your goals and aspirations?
• Benchmarking — How do you know whether you are meeting the skills benchmark of the organisation?

We wanted to make sure people were interested in a dedicated tool after becoming aware of some of the complexities above. So, we asked them.

Due to time constraints and the complexity of the considerations, we knew that we wouldn’t be able to answer all of the questions. However, it was still important to raise these items early in the research process to highlight any shortcomings of this exercise.

Most of our participants saw the value of a skills mapping tool as it put the user accountable for their progression and pushed them to improve their skills.

Others had some reservations when sharing that data with others within and outside of the organisation.

After completing a competitive analysis of current solutions in the market, we found that there wasn’t a solution that offered what the people of BVN needed.

We used this opportunity to explore the problem by designing a few screens that started to tick BVN’s needs. These designs were presented to BVN’s leadership team to begin discussions around potentially building a solution internally on top of their existing platform.

We developed 3 user flows to help understand how this would work for each of our identified personas.

and mapped our MVP to highlight any constraints.

We went wide with our prototype, explored and tested lots of different ideas

We proposed a solution that could be integrated with their mobile application.

Users can get clarity on the skills that are needed and expected of them to progress in their career.

Users can map their skills score

Peer reviewers can give consistent feedback

Be better prepared in conversations around your skills, strengths and learning