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BCS supports IT staff issue with new Skills Manager

The British Computer Society (BCS) has launched Skills Manager - a tool to help employers track the current skills set of their IT employees and identify areas where further development is needed. Designed to identify and effectively manage IT skills within an organisation, BCS Skills Manager will enable businesses to better understand their staff competencies and identify how closely their IT skills match the needs of the business.

Officially launched at the 2004 BCS Professional Development Forum, Skills Manager can be provided as a hosted or intranet solution and will enable organisations to carry out a range of management activities including selecting the right member of staff for particular projects, generating corporate job descriptions, assessing and confirming competence against an external benchmark and producing gap analysis reports.

BCS Skills Manager is based upon a skills inventory forming a database of IT staff in the organisation detailing their skills and specialisms. These are benchmarked against SFIAplus, an enhanced IT skills framework that builds on the nationally recognised models of SFIA (Skills Framework for the Information Age) and the BCS Industry Structure Model (ISM).

John Gwynne, BCS Professional Products Manager, commented, "This new software will help companies to maintain a firm grasp of the IT skills within their organisations and maintain the highest standards of IT professionalism. By implementing Skills Manager companies can expect to improve team effectiveness leading to the successful delivery of projects thus increasing job satisfaction, reducing staff turnover and cutting costs."

The BCS Skills Manager is underpinned by the InfoBasis Enterprise Skills Infrastructure (ESI) platform. Ashley Wheaton, CEO of InfoBasis, stated: "Successful IT projects are only as good as the people employed to get the job done, who in turn only thrive in the right position, with effective direction and management. BCS Skills Manager enables organisations to define their skills set and provide factual evidence - to the board if necessary - on where improvements in resourcing are required, allowing managers to prepare and plan for the long-term and deliver successful projects on time and within budget."

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