SkillsIQ launches Artificial Intelligence powered skills recognition service

National training organisation, SkillsIQ has launched SkillsAware, an innovative AI-powered skills recognition engine designed to discover, track and recognise individual skills in today’s fast-moving workforce.

Over the last six months, SkillsIQ, has been working in collaboration with Edalex, an award-winning EdTech and SkillsTech company and Dr Mark Keough, an Australian learning innovation pioneer, to create SkillsAware.

“We’re so pleased and excited to bring this new skills recognition service to market, offering a flexible and robust solution to the very real and pressing need to address skills gaps,” said Dr Mark Keough. “As a nation and across the world, the looming skills cliff is something all individuals, businesses, industries and societies will need to confront and take steps to mitigate. We believe that pairing the speed and scalability of AI, with the deep expertise gained in more traditional settings is key to accelerating the skills-first economy that has already begun to boom. There are people who need jobs and jobs that need people. The gap is not just a lack of training, but a lack of recognition of current skills and experience.”

SkillsIQ has mapped over 15,000 skills against industry-informed, quality-assured competencies within the National Training Package system to give organisations enormous insight into their workforce’s skills, and how they can build their business for success.

Yasmin King, CEO of SkillsIQ advises “SkillsAware provides a platform to identify the skills that workers already have, allowing organisations to identify gaps on an individual and organisational level and structure their workforce planning and recruitment more productively, while saving money on excess training that is not required.”

The new entity will offer an AI-powered service that captures and maintains an evidence-based indicator of the many skills that individuals develop from formal and informal learning. Organisations that licence the service gain insight into the full spectrum of skills that exist in their workforce. They can use this heightened level of skills visibility to identify skill strengths and gaps and enable decisions backed by evidence around skills-based hiring, workforce training, planning, resourcing and more. As a result, SkillsAware contributes significantly to a wide range of business imperatives, including productivity, performance, reward, diversity and equity goals.

Dan McFadyen, Managing Director of Edalex enthused “we are so pleased to be working with the SkillsIQ team and Dr Keough, building on our existing relationships and leveraging their collective expertise. For our part, we are delighted to incorporate our Credentialate, open EQUELLA and open RSD platforms and the talent of our team in support of the SkillsAware service, and look forward to seeing the impact we can deliver for the market.”

From an institutional perspective, SkillsAware can dramatically streamline the RPL process, incorporating an AI engine trained on a library of more than 15,000 industry-aligned, quality-assured competencies.

Individuals who use SkillsAware will also obtain benefits, such as independent validation of their prior learning and experience, with positive implications for their career and lifelong learning.

The SkillsAware service is currently undergoing user acceptance testing via a number of design partners, with anticipated availability in early 2025.

Enterprises, volunteer organisations, industry bodies and others interested in the service are encouraged to contact the SkillsAware team to learn more and request a demonstration at https://skillsaware.com