Measuring Employee Skills
Doris Kwon
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
In today’s fast-evolving labor market, there is a critical need for reliable and scalable skill assessment tools. Existing methods often fail to accurately capture workers’ capabilities, or the specific skills required for particular jobs, leaving gaps in both hiring and workforce development. Generic and static job descriptions don’t reflect the dynamic nature of tasks, often listing irrelevant qualifications that create unnecessary barriers to employment. Meanwhile, supervisor evaluations, although useful for goal setting, are prone to subjectivity and bias, further compounding the difficulty of assessing true skills. These shortcomings not only limit workers’ ability to plan their career paths but also hinder employers from identifying skill gaps within their workforce and aligning talent with organizational needs.
In this project, we will explore whether employer workflow data can be used to develop such effective skill assessment measures, particularly for frontline workers. To do so, we plan to i) conduct a literature review to gain a better understanding of how skills are being measured by employers as well as in the academic literature; ii) collect and analyze data on worker profiles and business operations; and iii) organize a convening with a small group of employers to discuss and refine our findings.
This team will work under the leadership of Professor Matthew Bidwell and Postdoctoral Researcher Dr. Doris Kwon, with support from the Wharton People Analytics team.
