5 steps to build a skills map that suits you
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Estelle
Content manager
October 20, 2020
8 min
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To meet their increasingly specific operational needs, companies are now looking for more employees based on their skills only about their job. The main challenge is to match the skills needs of companies and those held by their employees.
In this context, it therefore seems important for the company to have a real-time dynamic skills mapping. This mapping will in particular make it possible to identify the skills mastered by each of the collaborators, the associated levels of expertise, the skills in tension...
A dynamic skills mapping is an essential decision-making tool when it comes to defining strategic recruitment or training plans.
Napta is an intelligent competency-based resource planning solution, deployed to 20,000 employees around the world. In particular, Napta supports its customers in building and maintaining a comprehensive and up-to-date dynamic skills mapping of their employees to help them in their HR choices.
In this article, we share with you our advice for building a dynamic skills map based on the best practices observed by some of our customers.
One skills mapping is a snapshot at a given moment of all the company's skills. It makes it possible to determine the knowledge, know-how and interpersonal skills of each employee.
This mapping is based on a list of skills pre-established by the structure, which is called competency framework. Employees can go through this framework and indicate the skills that are specific to them.
If you've already heard about dynamic skills mapping, it's worth recalling what its main HR and operational goals are and how to use them effectively.
Building and managing your dynamic skills map.
As we suggested above, a dynamic skills mapping is a strong operational tool that allows a company to set up 6 fundamental actions.
The company's skills are combined in a coherent and documented common base. In fact, all the company's stakeholders have a single definition by competence. If a project manager asks his manager for a collaborator with expertise in “Infra” or “Change”, both the project manager, the manager and the employees who declare their skills must have the same definition of these terms. No more misunderstandings or loss of information!
If we go back to the previous example, dynamic skills mapping should make it possible to immediately identify employees with “Infra” and “Change” skills. Once these profiles have been identified, it becomes possible to ask them on a specific subject or to mobilize them on a project.
By visualizing the skills needed by the business and those available, it is easier to establish effective training and recruitment plans. These decisions are part of a logic of Strategic Workforce Planning.
Plus the knowledge of skills of each is fine, the more the skills development plans proposed (”Upskilling”) can be individualized.
To measure the impacts of HR actions, it is important to monitor how the skills of each of your employees evolve.
For certain tasks, the law, in the strict sense of the term, requires that the employee in charge of them have certain certifications. This is very common in industry in particular. It is then essential to monitor the authorizations of each of them and ensure that they are valid.
These are all good reasons to define a skills framework and map the skills of your employees. It's worth remembering that all of these goals are correlated to the fact that your dynamic skills map is up to date. This is a must. We'll explain how to do it later.
Before getting to the heart of the matter, you must ensure that certain prerequisites necessary for the proper construction of your dynamic skills map are in place.
• Anticipate recruitment and internal mobility needs
• Determine training needs
• Identify the right profiles to fill a position
• Establish competent project teams to respond to calls for tenders
• Anticipate losses of expertise linked to departures or unavailability (turnover, retirements, unavailable employees)
• Prepare for annual interviews
• Ensure that everyone's certifications/authorizations are up to date
• Promote self-assessment
• Serve as support for management
• Indicate your development wishes and aspirations
• Visualize the skills on which to improve in order to evolve in the company
In small structures (< 50 employees), it can be a single person who dedicates 2 to 3 hours of their time to setting up this project.
In the largest entities (> 50 employees), it is better to designate a group of a few people from different professions on this project: a recruitment manager, a training manager, an operational director, managers, for example.
Do you want to build a dynamic skills map for your entire company or only for a given department? In the context of monitoring authorizations, for example, it may be appropriate to reduce the mapping to the population concerned. However, for all the macro objectives listed above, you should include all of your employees in the exercise. It is up to you to clearly determine the target population in advance according to the objectives of your mapping.
Before tackling pure skills, let's start with the overall structure of the competency framework that supports mapping.
At Napta, we recommend that our customers start with a simple and meaningful competency framework for all stakeholders: Managers, Employees, Planning Managers, HR.
In particular, drawer repositories should be avoided, which discourage those who browse them and whose maintenance is extremely cumbersome.
Example: Category A > Sub-category A > Skill B > Sub-skill B
We recommend that you set up a simple two-level structure: Competency categories ➡ Skills
Here are the basic rules that Napta defines to define this structure:
✅ Between 10 and 20 categories depending on the size of your company to facilitate the experience of your employees
✅ 20 skills per category on average to keep the framework concise and navigable:
a maximum of 250 skills for a company with less than 500 employees
a maximum of 400 skills for a company with more than 1000 employees
✅ Between 1 and 4 skills scoring systems (languages/certifications/hard skills/soft skills)
The most important aspect to keep in mind when building this structure is to remain very consistent with your internal organization. For example, by choosing transversal skill categories and skill categories specific to the various business areas.
At Napta, the basic categories that we recommend to our customers are as follows:
• Sectors of activity
• Type of project/mission
• IT tools
• Languages
• Certificates
• Methodologies
External references such as that of APEC, or even that of the CIGREF can possibly serve as a starting point for building your own frame of reference, provided you adapt this database to your own context, which will require energy. We observe that the most effective skills frameworks are those built ex nihilo thanks to rich exchanges between operational staff and HR managers.
If you have doubts about the structure of your competency framework to adopt, do not hesitate to contact us so that we can share with you some best practices identified over time with our various customers.
“What can't be measured cannot be managed.”
Peter Drucker
It is essential to assign a scoring system to each identified skill in order to be based on a real mapping. Objective and exploitable.
Once the overall structure of the competency framework has been defined, it is therefore necessary to assign to each competence an evaluation standard with objective and quantitative criteria to avoid employees undervaluing/overevaluating themselves.
These scoring criteria may be different depending on the category or skill in question:
• For sectors and activities, the number of years of experience may be retained, or the number of projects carried out in this sector.
• For languages, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) assessment scale is the most widespread.
• For certifications, opt for a binary “true/false” evaluation system - in other words “I am certified/I am not certified” - or go back to the levels sometimes given by them.
• For the mastery of particular tools, a specific rating scale may be assigned.
This scoring system will make it possible to base the reference system on a common and objective standardized basis and will allow employees to self-assess themselves by respecting standardized and objective criteria.
It would be possible to build a dynamic skills map without directly collecting employee information, for example based on the knowledge of managers or HR managers. However, this is under-efficient. Indeed, if the skills framework is standardized and objective, each employee can easily indicate the skills they have and their level of expertise on each of them.
Putting employees back at the heart of project management also has several benefits:
📜 Have a more comprehensive vision of an employee's skills. We observed with our customers that when the employee declared his skills himself, the number of skills declared was significantly higher than when a third person did it for him (65% higher on average).
✨ Capture the aspirations and development wishes of your employees. This information is valuable and makes it possible to draw up individualized development plans.
👍 Keep the competency framework up to date. When declaring their skills, the employee must be able to suggest new skills that the referees would not have thought of. This feedback can be crucial because an employee can contribute their specific knowledge of new tools or languages acquired in the field, and not detected until now. The referrer should be able to decide whether or not to include the suggested new skills. In a world where skills evolve very quickly, the support of employees is essential to keep a competency framework up to date.
Once your first campaign of skills mapping finalized, integrate its update into your management processes, your feedback circle and your HR decision-making processes and GPEC. The aim is to make this cartography dynamic and to perpetuate it over time.
Some examples of situations that will allow you to have an updated map, actionable and perennial :
• update the skill levels of collaborators during annual evaluations and end-of-project evaluations;
• update the skills, certifications, authorizations of employees automatically on the basis of the latest training courses taken;
• validate or modify the levels of expertise declared by employees thanks to feedback from managers;
• inform employees by email when new skills are added to the competency framework so that they can easily declare them on their profile, if necessary.
At the same time, keep your skills framework up to date:
• give employees the opportunity to suggest new skills;
• set up a framework evolution committee with all stakeholders every 6 months in order to decide which skills to add, remove or merge.
Have a dynamic skills mapping Is a necessity to align your HR choices with your operational challenges. It allows you to know exactly your teams, to know what profiles and what skills to assign to which projects, and to make your employees actors in their professional development. The map update is a key issue, only a digital solution integrated into your processes (project feedback, evaluations, training, etc.) will allow you to achieve this objective.
Napta helps agile businesses build a competency framework customized. From this reference frame is born in 2 weeks a dynamic skills mapping comprehensive, cornerstone of the strategy of policies for increasing skills, recruitment, and training. By integrating into their processes, Napta allows its customers to bring mapping to life automatically over time.
Do you want to go deeper into the subject? We have lots of resources at your disposal to help you go further.
In addition to this subject, find our Staffing management: 4 processes deciphered”.
Also discover our guides, templates and checklists in the Resources tab.
See you soon at Napta!
To find out how Napta helps you create a skills map customized to your business, ask to talk to an expert.
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