Talent Management

Skill & Competency Models
Workforce Metrics
Strategic Workforce Planning

Skill & Competency Models

The development and planned use of competency tools is essential for recruitment, growth, promotion and retention. Competency tools should reflect uniform, values-based expectations of employees, such as trust, contribution, productivity and team work, as well as position-based knowledge, skills and abilities.

Sibson helps higher education institutions to:

  • Identify organizational, values-based competencies expected of all employees
  • Define expectations for each of those universal competencies
  • Implement universal expectations as measurable contributions for position-based competency mapping
  • Identify core institutional strategic strengths and career families
  • Involve career family members to identify competencies at three levels of contribution:
    • Introductory or entry level
    • Full performance or mastery level
    • Expert contribution level

Once universal and position-based competencies have been developed, Sibson consultants help to build these competencies into:

  • Recruitment document and position descriptions
  • Training that builds organizational and individual growth and capacity
  • Performance feedback mechanisms
  • Identification of areas of organizational strength or needed capability building
  • Focus for retention strategies
  • Strategies for enhancing employee opportunities for professional growth and engagement


Workforce Metrics

Sibson offers seminars and consulting support in metrics for higher education institutions who want to understand the fundamentals of measurement, link administrative unit plans to institutional strategy, and identify quality metrics for each major unit operational process and programmatic initiative.

Understanding functional measurement fundamentals requires that institutions:

  • Understand the business case for measurement
  • Develop a common language associated with measurement
  • Understand leading and lagging metrics and the value of each
  • Learn the taxonomy of measurement and what measures match best with needed reporting
  • Understand balanced scorecards and be able to adapt those to unit reporting
  • Examine institutional strategies and how to link unit plans to those strategies
  • Set outcome based, measurable targets for value-added contribution
  • Determine the metrics that will demonstrate success in terms of quality, quantity, cost, time, communication and customer satisfaction

When clients are focused on operations or process-based metrics, Sibson consultants will help them:

  • Describe the operational process "end-to-end"
  • Define the elements of the process that are of greatest importance to the customer
  • Determine the "value added" by each step in the process
  • Examine all opportunities for simplification and automation
  • Redesign the process
  • Identify quality, quantity, cost, cycle time, communications and responsiveness metrics
  • Incorporate customer-satisfaction feedback into continuous improvement


Strategic Workforce Planning

Sibson's Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) system enables institutions to better understand future talent requirements, anticipate and address talent gaps before they have a negative organizational impact, and more effectively prioritize and implement the actions required to ensure the right people are in the right place at the right time.

Why consider Strategic Workforce Planning?

Making uninformed choices around current and future talent requirements can significantly restrict an institution's ability to execute its strategy.

Traditional approaches to workforce planning have proven to be woefully inadequate as they do not provide the insights, analytics or information needed to:

  • Clearly link institution strategy to human capital needs
  • Identify the specific number, type and quality of talent required to execute on your strategy

SWP is a proven approach to more effectively:

  • Identify the type of talent required by your strategy
  • Determine the number of people you need to execute your strategy
  • Identify and prioritize key talent gaps that will restrict growth and profitability
  • Identify other human capital issues that prevent you from getting the best use of your talent
  • Define HR functional strategies, priorities and service delivery models that best support strategy execution and result in greater value delivered by the function

SWP brings fact-based insights to the strategic decision-making table regarding the human capital required to successfully execute your institution's strategy. It allows you to identify:

  • Which roles/skill sets are most/least critical to achieving our strategic objectives?
  • Which roles/skill sets do we need to build or strengthen?
  • Which roles/skill sets do we need to streamline or shed?
  • What is the projected number of people we need by role/skill set over the course of the strategy based on the relationship of the role to the strategic objectives?
  • What is the current productivity of our incumbents in roles/skill sets that we need to build and/or strengthen?
  • What are the potential dynamics in our current talent portfolio that will result from anticipated retirement, turnover, and other movement (e.g., promotions, re-assignments across functions/academic units)?
  • What are the implications of incumbent capability and anticipated portfolio changes? Do we have talent gaps? If so, where are they? How big are they? What is the expected financial and operational impact if left unaddressed?
  • What actions are required to close these talent gaps and ensure we have the right number, type and quality of talent when we need it and where we need it?
  • What should the strategy and priorities of the HR organization be to ensure it is fully aligned with and supporting strategy execution?