Each of your staffers has something special to bring to the table. Maybe they’re proficient in Adobe, have a background in technical writing, or are fluent in a second language. Every person on your team has specific talents, expertise, and things they do best. When you’re building project teams, you want to make sure you’re assigning staffers to tasks that match their skills and what they’re best at.
This is where BigTime’s skills matching feature can help. Skills matching is a way for firms to record staffer’s skills and make quicker, more intelligent allocation decisions. With skills matching activated, you can create any number of skills you want and assign them to staffers or roles in BigTime. Then, when you’re looking for available staffers for a project, you’ll be able to use skills as a filter on your staff list to find the right people.
Skills matching is designed to make your staff and project management more efficient and impactful by ensuring that each staffer is using their skills to the fullest. To illustrate how this feature works, let’s look at an example of how a firm might use it to support resource allocation and staff management in the real world.
NOTE: This article, and all other articles in the Skills Matching section, explain how to use BigTime's basic skills matching features. If you need a more advanced tool for skills management that also lets you manage time off and utilization, talk to your customer support person about adopting BigTime's resource management module, BigTime Foresight. You can learn more about this module by visiting the BigTime Foresight section of our Knowledge Base.
Skills Matching in Action
Charlie Brown runs Schulz Group, a successful New York-based architecture firm. He uses BigTime to handle his company’s finances, timesheets and project planning. Recently, the company expanded internationally and took on clients in Mexico City. As such, Schulz Group needed employees who have Spanish language skills. Charlie hired Linus Van Pelt and Lucy Van Pelt, who are both fluent Spanish speakers.
To keep track of which staffers have this skill, Charlie wants to take advantage of BigTime’s Skills Matching feature. Charlie has system admin permissions in BigTime, which means he can go to his firm’s ACTIVE FEATURES page and activate the SKILLS feature for his firm.
Now he’ll be able to add new skills to his firm’s skills list page. In the skills list window, he clicks the ADD SKILL button and adds a “Spanish Fluency” skill.
Now that he’s created a Spanish Fluency skill, he can add it to the staff dashboard of any Spanish-speaking staffer. Linus and Lucy can both speak Spanish, so he clicks their names from the Staff List and assigns them the Spanish Fluency skill under their SKILLS tab. He clicks SAVE CHANGES to save his updates.
If he has the SKILLS field enabled in his staff list view, Charlie will now be able to see “Spanish Fluency” listed next to both Linus and Lucy’s names.
Right now, each person in Charlie’s staff list has just one skill at most listed next to their names, making it easy for him to scroll and find his Spanish speaking staffers. But if Charlie decides to assign more skills to each staffer, this list could get cluttered and become harder to manually sort through. If this is the case, Charlie can click the SKILL SEARCH button to filter his staff list by skills.
This will open a window where he can select which skills he’d like to filter his staffers by. He selects “Spanish Fluency” from the dropdown menu under LANGUAGES and clicks APPLY.
This will hide all staffers from his list except for the ones who have been assigned the Spanish Fluency skill – in this case, Linus and Lucy.
In the future, Charlie can return to this page any time he needs to find staffers with specific skills to add to a project team. He can also add as many skills as he wants to his firm’s skill list, and can assign staffers a rating for each skill depending on a staffer’s proficiency level. He can even add skill-specific fields to his reports to see how and where certain skills are being used in past projects.
These are just a few ways skills matching might work in a real-world context. To further familiarize yourself with skills matching and to start using it for your firm, take a look at some of the articles below: