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7 preconceived ideas about skills mapping
Change Management
Skills development

7 preconceived ideas about skills mapping

Estelle
Content manager
June 23, 2022
5 min

Competency mapping is one of the major essentials in many companies. However, not everyone uses it in the same way, not taking into account all of their possibilities. Indeed, some professionals think they know it like the back of their hand. We take stock of the received ideas about skills mapping in this article!

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1. Competency mapping is a snapshot of the company at the moment... and nothing else!

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If the skills mapping makes it possible to know, at the moment, what skills are held by all the company's employees (level of expertise, certification, etc.), it is essential for the company to be evolving and dynamic in order to be constantly up to date. It is therefore not just a simple inert document, which retransmits a photograph of the skills profiles of your employees.

Indeed, defining skills mapping as a photo at the moment is very simplistic. Your competency map also details the know-how and interpersonal skills of your employees with great precision. Moreover, it is not for nothing that some make it possible to identify the skills development wishes (also called the β€œaspirations”) of employees by a color game...

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It is therefore a living document, enriched by a lot of information from all the company's employees, which quickly becomes obsolete or unusable, if its database is not updated regularly.

Point of vigilance: a skills map on Excel will never be as accurate and up to date as a map carried out on a specialized tool.

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2. Competency mapping is a useless document for project planning.

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You think that the skills mapping Is it useless to carry out your staffing strategies successfully? Do you think that it is a tool only intended for HR departments that is only involved in training or recruitment strategies? A myth that impacts not only the motivation of your employees but also the performance of your project teams!

Indeed, a dynamic skills map contains vital information to make project planning decisions very quickly, such as:

  • The interests or disinterests of employees for a skill, a subject, a sector...
  • The skills and levels of expertise of employees,
  • Mandatory certifications or qualifications
  • Sectoral and technical expertise, etc.

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All these elements make it possible to create competent and motivated project teams, which will have every chance of succeeding in their project. It's your whole structure when it benefits.

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3. Skills mapping and job mapping are the same document

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Job mapping is not the organization chart, which only reports on positions held within the company. Business mapping, also called business reference in some companies, reports on:

  1. Jobs essential to the company, to ensure its development and its growth phase,
  2. The number of positions assigned to each profession (there may be several HR, several consultants...),
  3. Vacant and expected positions in the company,
  4. The jobs to be created, in order to develop the company. These jobs are very often linked to goals of increasing skills, financial...

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Competency mapping goes much further. Above all, it takes stock of the skills available or not available in your company and makes it possible to highlight the skills profiles and competencies in tension (but also the skills, aspirations, diplomas, certifications, etc.).

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4. Competency mapping is not a tool for employees

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Just as mapping is a valuable tool for managers, it is in the interest of your employees and your company that they participate in the construction of your skills map. From the start, their involvement in the construction of the skills framework ensures its comprehensiveness. In addition, your employees are in the best position to give information on their interests/disinterests in terms of skills development.

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Employees can also use skills mapping to identify experts on certain competencies outside of their team, department, or even office. Having a map makes it possible to promote mutual aid and exchanges between employees! In EDF's R&D department, for example, expert communities have been created so that employees can discuss common topics with each other through skills mapping.

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5. Implementing a skills map is difficult in a large company

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It's one of the biggest misconceptions about cartography. Changing processes raises some concerns among management and managers. However, the deployment of a competency map at the enterprise level takes place according to a proven methodology (just like for project planning software, for example).

At Napta, in 4 months of work, the software was deployed across all departments of the company. To give you an overview, watch our webinar with Capgemini or EDF, two major companies. With them, the mapping was implemented in less than 6 weeks, on 1300 and 2000 employees respectively, with completion rates by employees greater than 95% from the first week of launch. Just that!

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Find out how Capgemini Invent implemented a skills map for +1300 employees! See the testimonial.

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6. All data must be entered by hand

Another common mistake: believing that skills mapping, when deployment, requires entering all information by hand. The technical teams in charge of deployment enrich skills mapping through connections between your mapping tool and the other software in your computer system (SIRH, LMS, ATS,...) in order to extract data. This extraction takes the following form:

  1. Personal information on employees is retrieved automatically thanks to an integration with the HRIS.
  2. Skills are consolidated in a framework accessible by all employees from their profile and everyone is responsible for adding their skills to their profile.
  3. The levels of expertise are updated after automatic retrieval of feedback (end of mission or end of year)

This extraction is more or less long, depending on the number of cross-functional software programs with which you work: SIRH, LMS, etc. Software data is centralized in a single tool, facilitating their analysis on a daily basis.

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7. It is independent of other digital tools

Last big (false) misconception: Competence mapping is independent of digital tools. As we have just seen, the skills mapping can be managed by a tool that is integrated into your company's IS and that interconnects with your other tools. When data is extracted, the skills map is up to date with company data. Each time your employees use ancillary software such as an HRIS, CRM, ERP, etc. This software is interconnected to your staffing solution.

You therefore benefit from a 100% efficient tool, which grows thanks to the data entered into the software and which feeds the other tools to avoid double entry. You benefit from an interconnected digital ecosystem in the company, through which you save considerable time on a daily basis.

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