Navigating skill alignment conversations

Steps to follow:

1. After you and your team member have each completed your skill assessments separately, you can begin working through the alignment conversation together.

2. In the dashboard, click the action menu item for a team member then click on "Complete alignment conversation".

3. The 'Occupation skills alignment' tab is where you can prepare, conduct and review progress throughout your alignment.

4. If you haven't aligned any skills yet, you'll only see the 'Skill levels to align' section.

5. This section is split into two groups: 'Possible upskilling opportunities' and 'Likely on target'. This is to help you prioritise which skills you spend the most time on. The (?) tooltip for each will give you more details.

6. As soon as you're ready to discuss skills with your team member, you can share the details with them. This will let them view the occupation requirements, see your assessment and contribute to the skill journal.

7. As you mark each skill alignment as complete, they'll move to the "Aligned skill levels" section at the bottom of the page.

Let's align this skill.

8. Based on the details shown in the row, we already know that the occupation requirement is higher than the manager has assessed and a gap is likely to occur - depending on the outcome of the conversation.

9. You can click through the descriptions for each level and discuss your perspectives objectively. Since this occupation requires level 5 and the employee has assessed themselves at that level, that’s a great place to begin this conversation.

10. During the discussion - you'll likely cover a lot of ground and need to refer back to it later when you're building plans for development - so use the Skill Journal to collaborate and capture notes.

11. If you turned on the "Share skill" toggle - your team member will also be able to leave notes here too.

12. Once you’ve agreed that the selected level best reflects their current capability, mark the skill complete and save. This will confirm whether an upskilling opportunity has been uncovered.

13. Save your selections to move on.

14. If the level agreed upon in the alignment conversation resulted in an upskilling opportunity the skill will show up in the 'Development plan' tab.

15. Notes in the skill journal will be viewable on this space too. 

16. Review what you spoke about previously and keep each other up-to-date on how this skill is being demonstrated over time.

17. Each skill has a separate journal so you know exactly what's been discussed for each skill, you can copy/paste from the skill journal directly into the skills development goals.

18. As you progress through alignment, you can create development plans one skill at a time or complete all discussions first and build them afterwards. whichever suits your workflow. 

More on the Aligned skills section

Over time, as development goals are completed and gaps are closed - the number of upskilling opportunities will reduce and your team member will soon have all their skills at or above the required level.

But even while there are skill gaps present, the aligned skill levels section represents a shared understanding between you and your team member of their current capability - and what you're doing to support them.

When either of you change the level you selected, skills will move back to the top 'Skill levels to align' section automatically - meaning it's time to have another conversation. You can also resurface it manually any time you need to re-align, using the 'Push back to alignment' button.

Completing the alignment for all skills in your team not only allows you to give your people support on the skills where they really need it but allows your organisation to make sure their L&D programs are targeted, efficient and tailored to your team.