Undertaking a skills audit

Introduction

A skills audit is a way of mapping out the skills, experience and behaviours you need to run your organisation effectively and achieve your aspirations. The benefits of completing a skills audit include:

Being able to identify people's motivations and interest areas. 
Identifying any hidden talent that you can put to good use. 
Confirming people's interest in continuing to volunteer. 
Revealing any skills gaps and helping you plan how to fill them.
Flagging any training and support needs.
Supporting you with succession planning so you can continue to operate without disruption.

What skills do you need?

Before developing a skills audit, it's important to be clear what type of organisation you want to be. The skills and behaviours you need will vary based on: 

The size and complexity of your organisation and your activity offer. 
Your organisation's ambition and outlook. Do you want to maintain your status quo, or do you aspire to grow, diversify your income streams and form closer links with your local community? 
The diversity of your people. It’s important you have the skills and behaviours you need to meet the needs and aspirations of your participants and volunteers. It's also important to ensure you have diversity in your decision making and operations.
Whether you own, lease or license your facilities or hire them. Organisations that have responsibilities for running and maintaining their facilities are likely to need extra skills to do this.
The structure of your organisation and its legal status, as this may require you to fulfil certain rules and regulations.

Undertaking a skills audit 

Creating a skills audit will help you to assess the skills you need to run your organisation effectively. It can play a key part in helping you achieve your goals.  You can create a skills audit by following this easy step-by-step process.

Step 1: Create a small working group to lead the skills audit

A skills audit should be a living document that is done at least annually so it reflects the changing needs of your organisation and the skills and interests of your volunteers.
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Before you begin the process of creating a skills audit, we recommend:
- Identifying someone to lead the skills audit and others to support the process, review and action planning.
- The timescales for each stage of the process.
- How you will undertake the audit and manage the information you receive to ensure confidentiality.
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Step 2: Identify existing roles

Identify the existing roles that you consider to be critical for your successful operation. If you already have a diagram or a list of all the roles in your organisation, you can use this as your starting point.
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Think about all the roles involved in the: 
- The management and governance of your organisation.  
- The delivery and promotion of your activities.
- The day to day running of your organisation and any facilities you might have.
- Events and fundraising.
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Step 3: Break existing roles into tasks

Break each role down into tasks. List the key tasks that must happen to enable you to function and those needed to ensure your plans become a reality, as in our examples.
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Club Secretary key tasks:
- First point of contact for enquiries.
- Organising and overseeing administration and meetings including the AGM.
- Dealing with incoming and outgoing correspondence.
Coach key tasks:
- Organise and deliver sessions.
- Record attendance.
- Team selection.
- Performance evaluation.
- Coach team.
- Safeguarding and welfare.
- First aid.
- Team motivation.
Treasurer key tasks:
- Manage money coming in and going out.
- Create and manage budgets.
- Prompt the collection of subscriptions and fundraising.
- Keep accurate financial records.
- Make payments.
- Produce accounts and financial statements.
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Step 4: Identify any specific objectives for the coming year

Think about your aspirations for the coming year or two. Are there any new roles or skills that you need to help you achieve these? If there are, build these into your skills audit too, as in our example.
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Aspirations for the coming 12 to 24 months:

Grow our social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Skills needed to achieve this:
- marketing and communications
- IT literacy
- knowledge of social media platforms
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Step 5: Identifying necessary skills and behaviours

Once you have identified the roles and tasks that need to be undertaken, both now and in the future, list out the skills and behaviours needed for each role or task. You can use the following example list to help you think about some of the skills, experience and behaviours you might need.
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Skills and expertise needed:
- Administration
-  Project planning and project management
-  IT literacy
- Financial
- Legal expertise
- Business acumen and strategic planning
- Income generation and fundraising
- Social media
- Marketing, PR and communications
- Website development
- Governance
- People management
- Experience of equalities and diversity issues
- Troubleshooting and problem solving
- Coaching or instructor skills and qualifications
- Safeguarding and welfare
- Human resources
- Logistics and operations
- Events management and stewarding
- Committee or board experience
- Customer care
- Conflict resolution
- Facilitating meetings
- Facilities management
- Facilities maintenance including trades (electrical, plumbing, decorating, gardening etc)
- Managing risk
- First aid
Behaviours needed:
- Empathy and patience
- Innovation
- Interpersonal skills
- Emotional intelligence
- Teamwork
- Ability to work independently
- Enthusiastic
- Accountability
- Assertiveness
- Creative thinking
- Leadership
- Motivational
- Committed to equalities, diversity and inclusion
- Active listening
- Supportive
- Ability to work in partnership
- Well organised
- Integrity
- Buddying
- Mentoring
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Completing a skills matrix

Once you have identified the skills and behaviours you need, you can create a simple matrix to help you evaluate what you need against the current skills and behaviours of your existing volunteers.

Step 6: Creating a skills matrix

There is no right or wrong way of doing this, the most commonly used method is to ask people to rank their skills and behaviours using a system of your choice. 
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You can also use your skills matrix to find out a bit more about your volunteers including; their motivations, experience relating to equalities and diversity, any areas they are specifically interested in and their development needs.

We would also recommend using the skills matrix as a way of checking that your volunteers are happy to stay involved with your organisation. You can build out your skills matrix by adding sections to capture the answers to these and any other questions you might have.

In addition to auditing the skills and behaviours of existing volunteers, some organisations capture the skills and interests of their participants and members when they first join or register for an activity. They then review this on a regular basis, for example at the point of renewal or at the end of season.
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Step 7: Review and use the results of your skills matrix

Reviewing each completed skills matrix and looking at the results across your pool of volunteers will help you determine if and where any gaps exist.
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You will then be able to think through the different ways you can fill these gaps, including:
- Internal training, development, and mentoring.
- External training and development courses.
- Recruiting new volunteers.
- Realigning your existing volunteers to better match their skills and interests.
The responses to the suggested questions 'tell us more about you' in Step 6 will also enable you to:
- Understand if your volunteers want to continue. This can help you to plan to replace them should the need arise. Also see our succession planning and recruitment guidance.
- Understand why people volunteer. You can then build on this and emphasise these in your communications and retention and reward techniques. Also see rewarding and retaining your volunteers.
- Help you consider if you need to increase the diversity of your volunteers.
- Determine if you need to reconsider the roles and tasks of any volunteer to best fit their interests and skills.
- Understand how satisfied volunteers are with their experience and whether there are actions that can be taken increase the likelihood of retaining them.
It is important to take the time to summarise your findings, identify any actions and the timescales for completing these. Sharing these documents with your committee or board can help to secure their ownership of the process and drive actions forward.

Remember to anonymise any results so that your volunteer's personal details remain confidential.
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Step 8: Recruiting new volunteers

There are various ways that you can go about recruiting new volunteers from within and outside of your organisation.
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One way you can recruit from within is by asking your participants and members (and their parents and carers) to regularly complete a skills matrix. This will help you to determine what skills they have and how they would be willing to put these to use to help you!

It's important to remember that just because someone has skills in a particular area, it doesn’t necessarily mean they will want to volunteer in this area, they might prefer to do something completely different!
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Useful download

Skills matrix template Document template to identify skills, expertise and behaviours of employees, and to review performance. Download the file - 709.49 KB

Undertaking a skills audit

Chapters in this topic

Introduction

What skills do you need?

Undertaking a skills audit

Step 1: Create a small working group to lead the skills audit

Step 2: Identify existing roles

Step 3: Break existing roles into tasks

Club Secretary key tasks:

Coach key tasks:

Treasurer key tasks:

Step 4: Identify any specific objectives for the coming year

Aspirations for the coming 12 to 24 months:

Skills needed to achieve this:

Step 5: Identifying necessary skills and behaviours

Skills and expertise needed:

Behaviours needed:

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Undertaking a skills audit 