IT skills gaps are being faced by employers at more than 498,000 sites across Britain

According to e-skills UK, IT skills gaps are being faced by employers at more than 498,000 sites across Britain.

But, for many organisations, itís difficult to pinpoint exactly where these skills gaps are. Launched by SkillSoft, the global online learning provider, íSkillViewí provides organisations with a strategic analysis of IT personnel. This analysis gives an overview of learning needs, flags up organisational skills strengths and weaknesses, and identifies areas where skills coverage is low or high.

Once IT skills gaps have been identified, SkillView enables organisations to map a comprehensive database of IT skill descriptions and job profiles to associated learning content. Users can also add their own organisation-specific jobs and skills.

The SkillView Competency Model currently contains more than 250 universal and IT-specific competencies, with approximately 100 mainstream IT job titles profiled against those competencies. The entire SkillSoft curriculum can subsequently be aligned to these with updates to core skills and courses updated automatically.

íSkillView XLí offers additional functions and provides organisations with total control over all data elements. Extended capabilities include 360 degree employee assessment, recruiting aids, and a skill-scoring function, which allows users to rank the importance of specific competencies to individual employees - in line with the requirements of their job roles.

Kevin Young, Managing Director of SkillSoft, explains:

Last year we undertook a major study where we spoke to senior HR practitioners across a number of global 500 companies. It was clear that the most sophisticated organisations amongst them had a very strong focus on linking learning to business objectives. These companies were routinely mapping competencies to job roles to help ensure their workforces have the skills required to address the needs of their businesses.

However, not all organisations have the time or the necessary resources available to help them achieve this. SkillView is designed to provide these aspiring organisations with an easy to implement solution, without placing an unnecessary burden on either IT or HR personnel.

SkillView will be available from May 2006. Future releases will expand on the IT offer to include finance, sales, marketing, engineering and other job disciplines.

For further information contact Kay Baldwin-Evans at kay_baldwinevans@skillsoft.com