Skills audits: why they’re important for your business

A successful aged care provider needs to know what its strengths and weaknesses are, including those of its staff. You cannot provide high-quality care if your staff are lacking the appropriate skills, attributes or opportunities to develop.

That’s where a skills audit comes in. It’s a process to easily identify skills gaps and plan the outcomes needed to elevate performance and knowledge within your organisation.

A skills audit can help you better address core compliance requirements from the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, including Standard 7. Human Resources.

Under this Standard, it’s essential you have a skilled and qualified workforce able to deliver safe, respectful and quality care and services. But it can also provide you with the necessary insight for addressing any internal organisational goals and benchmarks.

Benefits of a skills audit

A skills audit is a comprehensive review of the skills and competencies of individual staff members, allowing you to identify any skills deficiencies within your organisation. The review is either run by your own human resources team or through an external agency.

The outcomes will provide you with wide-ranging benefits for staff, care recipients and the organisation as a whole and enable you to:

• Get an understanding of your staff’s knowledge and skills
• Identify any gaps in knowledge and need for development
• Make sure you have the right people in the right roles
• Identify opportunities for expansion or restructure of the team
• Priorities focus areas for training
• Define any recruitment needs

Your human resources team, or relevant department managers, can plan strategic outcomes that will provide an improved return on investment, meet crucial compliance requirements and provide enhanced care outcomes for residents. 

There will be a clear understanding of what development is needed for skills growth. This includes developing or introducing new training courses, recruiting key skilled staff or restructuring departments to deliver improved care. 

Additionally, existing staff will understand where they need to improve to ensure they perform to their full potential. A skills audit can identify whether dementia care nurses require additional training and upskilling to provide tailored care to residents, if administration staff require more hands-on learning to understand new software, or if a young worker can be upskilled to become a future leader.

Thanks to the flexible scope and range of the audit, you’ll be able to focus on the entire workforce or a specific team. There are no timing requirements, but there are benefits to implementing an audit ahead of periods of growth or change, including expansion or restructuring. 

Meanwhile, holding a skills audit as a follow-up to an Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission audit enables you to gather more information on where improvement can occur to ensure full compliance if issues were found.

Four key components

Before you start make sure you communicate with your team and explain why you are doing a skills audit and how it will benefit them and the organisation. Be available for any questions they have throughout the process and reassure them that any information you collect is confidential. 

There are four key components of the skills audit. The exact process and analysis may vary depending, but it rarely strays from the successful methodology.

1. Identify roles and necessary skills

To begin, you want a clear understanding of what your data will be benchmarked against. First, map out who is involved with the audit so you can see what people and departments need to be included and notified based on the skill sets you’re going to assess.

Second, list their existing responsibilities and the skills required to fulfil their roles. Individuals involved in the audit may or may not have those skills already; these are the skills that are necessary for long-term success and growth. Examples include the proper use of personal protective equipment, the ability to show empathy to residents, manual handling skills, etc.

You can rank each skill in the level of importance if you believe there is a clear hierarchy of what skills are critical and those that can be developed. 

2. Assess existing skills and competencies

You want to have a wide understanding of how your staff perform and should collect data as both qualitative and quantitative. Quantitative, or numerical, data can be compared and measured while qualitative data provides direct staff feedback that can be used for evaluation and assessment. 

There are various ways to assess skills and competencies within the workforce. Task supervision, staff reporting, surveys and competency tests may be used individually or together. A combination of testing methods means you see how staff perform on the job, how it measures against other staff, and how they feel about their own skills.

Make sure you utilise a system that is easy to understand and report. It may be a pass or fail for some skills, while other skills could be on a sliding scale of performance.

3. Analyse the results

The analysis of results shows you exactly what you need to know; are there skills gaps, are staff performing on par, or are they exceeding expectations? You will have a great insight into where staff sit across a number of skills, and potentially about how they feel towards their own performance and development. 

From your results, you want to understand outcomes such as:

• What skills gaps exist in specific roles, teams or departments
• Whether skills gaps are present in areas where training and development are provided
• Who holds critical skills, and whether they are in the appropriate roles
• Where you can improve skills, either through training or recruitment

A thorough analysis of results will ensure you have the knowledge to implement the right solutions in the future.

4. Identify and implement solutions

With the analysis completed, your goal is to introduce and implement solutions. For example, will an additional emphasis on training and refresher courses help staff increase their knowledge? Or is that a practice that’s already employed and perhaps there are areas where online learning needs to be replaced by hands-on development and guidance? 

Other outcomes include targeted recruitment of skills and traits, restructuring to deploy skilled staff to critical roles, creating new development opportunities, or strategically redistributing finances to better support departments where investment is required.

Bonus: Conduct a follow-up audit

There’s no point in implementing change and not following up. Depending on the changes you implement, conduct a follow-up audit to ensure goals are being met. This could occur in six months or 12 months, depending on your requirements.

Are there other benefits?

The flow-on effects of a successful skills audit will benefit your staff, recruitment tactics, strategic planning, financial outcomes and more.

It’s not intended to just provide simple outcomes, you may have to ask some serious questions to understand why a skills gap is present.

Are there issues with staff retention or your existing recruitment process? If you’re hiring new workers without a long-term focus on their training and development, high turnover rates are likely. Staff will feel undervalued as there’s no investment in their growth. 

You could make staff retention a priority by introducing leadership programs that empower your workforce and support them in developing new skills. If you’re investing in existing staff and encouraging them to grow, then you can address skills gaps in a timely fashion.

One way to fill those gaps is by providing staff with valued peer support and mentoring to give them on-the-job development opportunities. Your skills audit will identify which staff are leading the way with experience and knowledge, and their influence can be maximised through simple rostering changes, for example.

Recognising that growth takes time is also essential. If your skills audit reveals staff are struggling in key areas, provide them with opportunities to learn. 

While you can certainly look to external recruitment to fill necessary gaps, you may find the best solutions are within your workforce already, and they just require the right support to develop.

What steps do you take to assess the skills and qualities of your workforce? Tell us in the comments below.