Product Description

The SkillsNET™ Skills Community Portal is essentially a community of practice that enables multiple diverse web applications to be combined into a "single view" portal – known as the Skills Community. The Skills Community is integrated with other online workforce development and e-Learning applications through the use of a linkage protocol. This ensures that any combination of internal and external web sites and services can be brought together.

The Skills Community solution comes with a collection of tools for building and managing single view sites at State, Region and Employer levels. State and Region views offer skill and knowledge libraries and State sponsored workforce development applications. Employer views offer workforce skills and knowledge library and Career Management System (CMS) components.

All three views are interconnected and allow forward and backward searches for workforce and career development resources. The key to the capabilities of the Skills Community is that it appears and performs a variety of functions in an ordinary browser.

The Business Opportunities:

• Enable successful online partnering by rebranding, repurposing and repackaging skills content and transactions from third-party partner sites.
• Allow rapid integration of worker skills and competencies as a result of mergers or other operational changes.
• Reduce costs of workforce development by integrating various tools and processes into one view.
• Leverage State and Educational resources to implement a Skills and Career Management System.

The Business Benefits:

• Increase precision in workforce development investments.
• Improve employee satisfaction through consistent user interfaces, single login process and choice of Career Management options.
• Provide better alignment with “customer needs” by understanding common skill and knowledge requirements to use company products or services.
• Improve training and education provider “rapid response” to workforce development needs.
• Leverage workforce skills and knowledge information from similar employers to implement “fast” performance improvement strategy.
• Allow savings from reuse of existing skills and knowledge library and career management web applications.
• Brings structure to unstructured occupational and workforce data.

Time to Implement:

The expected implementation time is on the order of two months for State and Regional views and two weeks for Employer views. This is possible because it builds a framework around existing hosted applications and services.

User Requirements:

The Skills Community is a hosted solution only requiring a browser. No hosting. No software license or development expense is required.

Estimated Payback:

Faster employee development improves productivity and contribution to bottom line profits
The improved online experience will help to migrate more career management activity online, thereby reducing traditional training department expenses.

The Skills Community becomes the packaging for the corporate workforce development solution and the business logic can be held within the portal. This saves the effort being directed to older solutions that may be more difficult or riskier to change.

The integration of skill and career management applications brings payback in two ways. First, the consolidation of user control and access as well as the centralization of skills data and learning content brings about a significant reduction in the costs of management and administration.

The second payback comes from the increased opportunities for selling or promotion. Simply by combining information from multiple sources within the portal single view, it is possible to provide users with opportunities to buy related products or to up-sell.

Capturing supply chain customer use of employer Skills Community provides invaluable market intelligence that would cost thousands of dollars using traditional marketing analysis and research processes.

Lastly, payback comes from intangible sources such as improved employee satisfaction, morale, and reduced attrition

Conclusion:

The SkillsNET™ Skills Community Portal centralizes diverse applications and information to provide rapid access to employers, employees, vendors, education and others in the community. Further, the Skills Community is allowing businesses to shift their investments for expensive web applications and services to more strategic market solutions. Suddenly, business change does not have to cost a fortune in application changes.

Other opportunities come with the ability to link applications together into a new business logic. This ensures that employees get a better view of skill and career management and its importance to their performance improvement goals.