was deemed unhelpful to expect these to self-assess against all twenty areas. A ver- sion of the spreadsheet with a sub-set of eight PKSB themes was therefore created for these members of our team to self- assess against.
Colleagues were asked to complete a copy of the spreadsheet by giving them- selves a score out of 10 where 1 indicates no knowledge to 10 being an expert in the area. The results were then collated to provide an overall score for each area out of 70 or 50 depending on which members of the team had completed each area.
Team and individual insight In addition to taking into account the overall team scores for each area it was necessary to consider how widespread in the team a particular skill or knowledge set needs to be. If most members of the team need to be confident in particular skills then a high score is important. However, it was recognised that there may be areas where a lower score is acceptable so long as the key colleagues delivering an element of the service are competent in the required area. Examples may be strategic planning where the manager would usually take the lead, or particular areas of specialist train- ing. Even in these areas, however, it may be desirable to develop skills beyond a sin- gle individual to cover succession planning and build in resilience to the service. Once considerations such as this were accounted for, the self-assessment scores were used to develop a ranking of the four or five areas which were scored lowest by the team and where skills were widely
50 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
required. The next step will be to source opportunities to improve skills, knowledge and competence in these areas through a range of learning opportunities.
Round up Lessons Learned
The experience shows that this method of approaching a skills audit is a fairly simple and straightforward way of identifying skills and knowledge needs within a team aligned to the strategic goals. The process took a relatively small amount of time for both the manager and the rest of the team and led to the desired outcomes in terms of identifying a small number of priority areas for development.
Two main challenges were encoun- tered during the exercise. First, although a supplementary explanation had been provided for each PKSB area explaining its applicability locally within the service, the wording contained a lot of “management speak”. Some members of the team sought clarification over certain areas. In future this could be addressed by making use of plain English in descriptions and asking colleagues to check wording in advance before rolling out the exercise. Secondly, there was a small amount of discrepancy around the scoring mecha- nism. Although guidance was provided for the 1, 5 and 10 scores, it became clear in discussions that colleagues had inde- pendently come up with slightly different interpretations of what each score level meant for them, potentially leading to lack of consistency. Self-assessment scoring is
obviously subjective by nature and one way to address this might be to agree a score jointly between each member of staff and the manager, particularly if the self- assessed score is radically different to that expected by the manager. This approach would obviously take more time and was deemed unnecessary in this example however it may deliver a more realistic audit if the manager was concerned about disparity between the manager’s and their staff’s perception of their current skills and knowledge level.
More quick wins
As a fairly simple technique which is quick to apply I would consider using this method of skills audit in the future. It offers a useful way to address the need to determine skills gaps whenever new strategic objectives and actions are introduced and/or when new colleagues leave or join the team. This technique works quite well in the case of Leeds Teaching Hospitals as the team is relatively small. It may be harder to implement in larger libraries teams since collation of results could be more difficult and time consuming. Adapting the tech- nique to make use of automation may be possible in such situations. It would be great to hear from other teams and services who are using the PKSB for skills audits in order to share ideas and improve our local approach. To find out more about how CILIP’s Professional Knowledge and Skills Base (PKSB) could help your organisation visit
www.cilip.org.uk/pksb. IP
Autumn 2025
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