Introduction
Globalisation and industrialisation across the world have resulted to extensive development of workforce-related aspects that influence organisational performance to meet the changing market demands (Scholarios & Taylor 2011). As inter-organisational and international competition within regional and multinational organisations increase, the need to improve service delivery through competent workforce has been one of the yearned aspects in the modern industries.
Skill, expertise, and personal attitude towards performing specific organisational duties have been significant pivotal aspects of labour processes and managers use them as criteria to examine the employees’ ability to qualify for certain job positions (Scholarios & Taylor 2011). Fundamental to the relationship between labour and capital at the workplaces, workers are deployed and supervised through such criteria.
Human Resource Management departments in organisations have always had challenges in determining workforce with the required competence (Payne 2009). Central to examining this workforce quandary, this essay seeks to explore skill management by identifying and critically evaluating the three approaches to assessing skill at work.
Skills and organisational performance
In the modern working environment, things seem to be changing rapidly and managers are always on commission to identify, examine, and employ workforce that can cope well with the changing economic and employment dynamics (Scholarios & Taylor 2011). The human resource must possess the appropriate leadership skills to enable them to oversee and improve skills found in another workforce.
Core competence skills enable managers and other workers within organisations to develop and manage a comfortable and productive working environment that enhances achievement of organisational goals (Ahmad 2008). The intent of organisations is to perform and gain market stability that is only achievable through attracting customers and providing a contusive environment for both employees and clients.
Working patterns, agreements, and protocols keep changing within organisations and as the world experiences numerous changes (Payne 2009). Core competency skills that include broad skills and abilities ostensibly enable both novice and experienced workers to manage, adapt, and respond to the changing working society.
Managers examine core competency skills to ensure that workers given specific duties are in a position to handle them with the needed expertise as the modern employment puts workers closer to clients (Scholarios & Taylor 2011). This aspect leads to emotional working where employees expect workers to demonstrate high levels of emotional self-management while dealing with relevant stakeholders, especially the customers.
Common competency skills examinable in organisations include leadership skills, people skills, cooperation skills, problem-solving skills, communication skills, social Judgment skills, entrepreneurial or business skills, and strategic organisation skills among several other essential skills.
These skills underscore the three major forms of workforce skills that determine workers’ ability to prove competent at work, which includes technical skills, human skills, and conceptual skills (Ahmad 2008). Understanding such three categories of core competency skills can significantly assist in understanding possible ways of identifying and critically evaluating the three approaches of assessing skill at work.
Three approaches of assessing skill at work
As discussed above, there are three distinct broad categories of skills essential for employee performance in organisations, including technical, human, and conceptual skills. These skills determine the effective administration that both managers and workers should possess. Technical skills can refer to the individuals’ knowledge about their profession and their proficiency in a specified field of work and may include “competencies in analytical ability, in specialised areas, and a person’s ability to use appropriate tools and techniques” (Payne 2009, 354).
Human skills in employment paradigm refer to the individuals’ knowledge or elements of a person’s ability to appreciate, work in partnership, understand fellow workers, and respect their contribution at the workplace. Also known as people skills, they involve workers’ ability to work effectively and peacefully with others without prejudice towards accomplishing organisational goals (Effinger 2009). Finally, conceptual skills involve the individuals’ ability to work with current and emerging ideas and concepts.
Technical skills and their appraisal
With the extensive development of technologies in the contemporary times, job requirements are increasingly demanding technical abilities in workers to perform their professional duties effectively using new and sophisticated technologies. Each skill complements other in the working environment and technical skills play a great role in this scenario.
As noted by Grugulis and Lloyd (2010), “technical skills not only provide the substance those soft skills require to be meaningful, but they also fundamentally affect the nature of the soft skills themselves” (p.101). Since some organisations proffer professional services, they bespeak additional technical consumer interaction skills (Effinger 2009).
Technical skills involve the appropriate and effective use of tools, equipment, and techniques available in organisations and may include apposite use of machinery and computers in performing stipulated duties (Effinger 2009). Employees must produce the desired products in the expected quality using the available mechanism in the organisation, which is only possible through understanding all producers and operations involved within the company’s practices.
Assessing technical skills in a company may involve a continuum of activities aimed at investigating individuals’ aptitude and dexterity in utilising the available machinery to perform certain duties (McGovern et al. 1998). For novices and newly employed workers, exposing workers to the operating systems is the first approach to begin examining skills inherent in the employees.
How they operate the systems, how they utilise manufacturing machinery and construction equipment in the case of building, coupled with how they use computers and other electronic devices as in the case of IT among other system are ways that managers can assess their technical skills (McGovern et al. 1998).
For the experienced workers, technical skills can be assessable by integrating new and advanced technologies and examining how the workers use their technical skills to deal with these innovations. Literacy tests or competency-based interviews can also help in examining the worker’s ability to perform or handle examinable assessments.
Human skills and their appraisal
Human skills in workers play an integral part in determining an employee’s ability in engaging in complex organisational matters, including critical decision-making processes. As explained by Payne (2009), “another factor said to require new thinking on skill is the shift towards a predominantly service-based economy where a growing proportion of the workforce is now engaged in face-to-face or voice-to-voice interactions with customers” (p.349).
Since workers in most organisations interact with clients often, there has been an increasing demand in employees to develop personal related skills to enable them to communicate effectively with customers (Heery 2009). Human skills are eminent in employees, who are capable of assisting managers to work efficiently with other superiors, subordinates, and other peers, as well as enabling leaders to work cooperatively with teams.
This group of skills enables workers to share ideas, opinions, and intuitions with other members while the same time allowing others to work comfortably by proving them with peaceful working environment. Determining or assessing the presence of this group of skills in the workforce is also an essential duty that managers must consider or prioritise in their management.
These skills as articulated are eminent in workers while working with autonomous groups where members are free to demonstrate and interact with fellow workmates. However, assessment differs in different levels of employment stages. As postulated by Scholarios and Taylor (2011), “during recruitment, employers emphasise social and communications skills through literacy tests or competency-based interviews” (p.1295).
Contrary to the incumbent workers, broader examination of human skills takes place through project-related programs that allow employees to share skills and openly interact with other workers. Managers can decide to initiate group projects under autonomous leadership where employees, managerial, and teamwork skills coupled with communication skills, which are imperative in employee performance, are quantifiable.
Conceptual skills and their assessment
Conceptual skills are the third groups of skills that employees must possess to enable them to work diligently and competently in the modern organisations. Workers comfortable with conceptual skills are capable of analysing problems within organisations in more skilful and systematic manner as conceptualised working skills involve working with ideas that shape organisations.
As noted by Grugulis and Lloyd (2010), “there has been an escalating interest in re-conceptualising skill, in part to reflect the growing focus of research on the service sector” (p.92). Employees with conceptual skills have the ability of setting goals for the company, while at the same time capable of understanding important economic principles that influence company’s performance.
These skills enable workers to work effortlessly with abstraction and hypothetical notions that help in developing strategic plans that involve vision and mission of the organisation. Examining or evaluating these skills might sometimes prove challenging given the fact that members in organisations demonstrate different levels of skills at the workplace.
However, managers with appropriate management skills and expertise can deploy a variety of approaches to identify the presence of these skills in workforce (Heery 2009). Since conceptualising leadership is all about acquiring and sharing ideas with workforce through the decision making processes.
Setting up individual projects with the purpose of examining worker’s ability in developing and implementing projects, while inventing their vision, mission statements, and objectives can help in investigating the presence of conceptual skills in workforce (Heery 2009). Managers should put workers into the task of establishing workplace problems, assisting them in analysing the problems and establishing their possible impacts to the development of the company. Only workers with the capability of identifying problems and creating solutions possess conceptual skills.
Conclusion
The industrial world is changing rapidly and acquiring competent workforce that will work diligently despite the incessant workplace challenges is becoming an important yet a challenging responsibility for employers in organisations.
Getting competent workforce requires managers to undertake appraisals in identifying and critically evaluating the three approaches to assessing skill at work. First, main understanding categories of skills in employees is one important factor that provides background to the examination of the skills available in workers. The three types of skills include technical, human, and conceptual.
With technical skills, managers can employ a continuum of appraisals using available machinery and tools to establish their ability to use these tools and related techniques appropriately. For the human skills, assessing workers communication skills, leadership skills, and teamwork skills through literacy tests or competency-based interviews is imperative. Conceptual skills involve workers’ ability to work straightforwardly with abstractions and hypothetical philosophies.
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