I know this is highly embarassing for me, can someone give a quick explanation of what a skills audit is?
Cheers Ryan_Liam
The way I have heard it used is as follows: It is an evaluation of a company or a group within a company usually carried out by an outside consultant. They see how well your goals are matched to the skills of the employees in the company or group. They may recommend hiring someone with a skill or credential that is lacking in the group or, sadly, recommend reducing staff to get rid of redundant or unneeded employees.
Haj
I can think of at least four kinds of “audit” and they all have wildly different requirements.
If you audit a college course, you’re basically authorized to sit in the lecture hall, sit politely, listen, take notes and such, but not be required to take exams, and you get no credit for it. This requires very little skill other than being able to find the class.
Financial audits are generally done by CPAs or their equivalents. They do the “fine-tooth comb” bit on the financial records looking for irregularities and improprieties.
Bank audits are internal process reviews conducted by FDIC (The same folks that insure your deposits - they want to be sure the bank is doing things right to continue providing insurance) These folks make a fine-tooth comb look like a garden rake. They’ll ask for internal process records like the serial numbers of the bait money at such and such branch, teller cash receipts from seven months ago, or copies of all checks that were in Customer X’s deposits on January 23 and February 2. Woe to anyone who can’t provide these items!
Near and dear to my heart are system audits. It’s another process audit - the auditors ask for log files to see who had root access on a server on a specific day, and setup requests for users to make sure all the needed approvals were made, and things like that.
haj is right, the company is making sure that they have people with the right skills to accomplish the desired tasks. The company may also decide to train good employees who lack desirable skills, rather than just firing them and hiring somebody else.
-lv
I will also support hajario, although I would note that a very large company with a professional HR department (rare as those are) may actually carry out this sort of thing on their own, possibly even including it as a routine practice at various levels.
At a primitive level, such an audit may be nothing more than the software a person knows (Word or Word-Perfect, Excel or Lotus, that sort of thing). A more thorough audit would try to determine whether an employee was more likely to thrive or crash-and-burn when required to perform certain duties or functions. In this case, it would be similar to the various psych tests that indicate whether you are more shy or gregarious, etc., but it would be focused on actual skills that you possess. Despite the common aspect of “numbers,” for example, a math major might not really be suited to prepare the budget for a $10 million department of a major company if s/he had never prepared a budget beyond his or her monthly groceries.