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Press / 2005 / 6^th June

Demand for InfoBasis Readiness Manager Shows Interest in Skills Management Increasing

London, UK, 7th June 2005: Employers are showing increasing interest in skills management, according to industry experts. Training companies and HR consultancies in particular have witnessed growing demand for skills management tools, such as InfoBasis Readiness Manager.

“We have recently deployed Readiness Manager for a project involving several hundred employees within a public sector client,” said Allan Pettman, Sales and Marketing Director of Parity Training. “It was the only tool available that made it possible to understand their project management skills to the depth they wanted, and to build personal development plans for all staff, linked to a broad catalogue of training and learning solutions.”

To support vital new transportation legislation for a major transport provider, HR Skills Management Consultancy Ergon Limited chose InfoBasis Readiness Manager as the only suitable solution that could automate deployment of the skills and competence required by the Act for efficient skills gap and training needs analysis. “Managers were then able to easily determine the roles for their teams. This enabled staff responsible for the new duties to understand their new responsibilities and what they needed training in, both behavioural and occupational,” says Senior Partner Peter O’Donnell. “Approved learning interventions are now being chosen and mapped to gaps. This will both reduce the cost of training and improve the efficiency of its delivery.”

Growing interest in skills management is driven by an understanding that for many organisations is now the best way to build productivity, says Ron McLaren, Operations Manager of the SFIA Foundation. “In a highly-skilled, high-employment economy, people represent both the greatest single cost to most organisations and the best opportunity for growth. Organisations such as Norwich Union which have been using the Skills Framework for the Information Age for some time, have demonstrated that by developing the staff you have you can both reduce contractor costs and increase efficiency.”

InfoBasis CEO Ashley Wheaton noted that interest in skills management has recently expanded beyond the area of IT skills. “Readiness Manager enables dynamic training needs analysis, and was initially enthusiastically adopted by IT training companies such as InterQuad, Parity, QA and Xpertise. Now employers understand the value of this approach, they are increasingly also using it to develop staff in other areas, particularly soft skills and project management.”

To learn more about skills management, attend the Digital Skills Summit at Microsoft, UK on 20th June. For details and to register, visit www.infobasis.com/events.