Have You Addressed the Digital Skills Inventory of Your Employees?

Since it seems forever HR has touted, or should I say professed, the need for skills inventory and training to keep employees competitive. Surely, you have addressed this over the years and even with the extreme cutbacks over the last 2 years you have continued to develop your people either with a decent training and development budget or one that may be something less than a shoestring.

Today, both on the talent acquisition side or the talent management side you need to take a serious look at the "digital skills" inventory of your new hires, key executives, fast start employees, mid-level management and sales teams. This is not your average skills inventory but one that your company will benefit from for years to come. If you have not looked at this important element then here are a few of the key components of your new "digital skills" inventory checklist:

• how to get connected to the Internet, both on the road, in the office and at home. This may seem basic but if your employees cannot do this "you lose!!"
• how to use basic collaborative and knowledge exchanging tools for on-line meetings. This is important for non-centralized management teams, sales people displaying products and product testaments;
• mail - yes as simple as logging into mail systems, company proprietary, or products like G Mail, Hot Mail, or Yahoo Mail;
• how to capitalize on your company's internal social network (Facebook and Twitter, NSS), PeopleSoft/Oracle or other data gathering systems that employees would use;
• Smartphone and other mobile apps that are important for the company or employee to use; and
• searchable databases external to the company utilized databases. 

All of these are important for your company to be competitive in today's world and to make your employees more valuable to you in generating additional revenue or product launches. In this effort your goal should be to be "digital" across the board. 

You should do a search on Google to see what other companies are leading the way in "digital skills". One company that is leading the way in P&G, and I am sure you are not surprised at that. 

I would appreciate your comments on this post and what your company is doing in defining and managing "digital skills" inventories.