Bring your hidden talents out to play! Get a better understanding of your team's unique competencies with skills mapping.
As a resourcing expert, you know that accurately assigning employees to tasks based on their skills can make or break a project. But what information are you using to inform these decisions?
When navigating the sea of resource allocation, you need a map — a skills map — designed to help you determine each employee’s skills and how they compare to project needs.
Let’s explore skills mapping in the context of resource management and how this process can benefit your organization.
Skills mapping is the process of identifying your employees’ skill sets and analyzing how they align with the requirements of their individual roles. The skills mapping process involves three main activities:
The goal is to create a clear picture of the skills you have available in your organization at an employee level, using these insights to elevate talent discoverability and inform strategic planning activities like skills management, skills gap analysis, and resource planning.
Skills mapping offers organizations many benefits beyond providing access to skill-related data. Here are four benefits of skills mapping you need to know.
Skills mapping is a process HR teams are well versed in, but it can also be a hugely beneficial practice for resource managers.
While it’s possible to conduct resource planning without completing skills mapping first, this is a bit like trying to bake a cake without following a recipe. Sure, you’ll produce something cake-like, but processes exist for a reason.
The outcome of skill mapping is to provide an accurate view of your team’s skills and how they compare to their job descriptions. Without this in-depth understanding of their abilities and strengths, you’ll likely run into problems such as:
That’s enough negativity for now. To help put this into perspective, let’s look at how skills mapping helps improve the resource management process.
Sure, you can make resource allocation decisions based on who’s immediately available, who has been requested by a project manager, or who you assume is right for a project.
But when you know exactly where each individual team member’s skills lie, you can more effectively allocate resources by matching people’s skills to project requirements, helping ensure they’re working on projects that utilize their strengths.
You can’t improve your workforce if you don’t understand what skills they lack. This is where skill gap analysis comes in.
Skills gap analysis is a simple way to identify discrepancies between your workforce's skills and the skills you need for projects to be successful. Resource managers can use this information to support conversations with HR around hiring and development.
However, conducting skills gap analysis becomes impossible when you don’t have up-to-date information on employees’ skills.
Having a solid understanding of the skills available within your team can help you forecast resource availability based on which employee skills you anticipate to be most in demand based on your project pipeline.
This will help you plan ahead, mitigate bottlenecks where specific skills are oversubscribed, address skill shortages, and reduce the risk of project delays.
No matter how well-prepared you are, plans will change at the last minute. Luckily, having data on your side will make all the difference when your plans need to pivot quickly, helping you get creative when times are tough.
For example, in the event of an unplanned absence, you can quickly identify who is best placed to pick up the slack. And if a project falls through, you can identify opportunities to creatively reallocate those resources, ensuring resource utilization remains high.
Ready to practice skills mapping? Here’s how to implement the skill mapping process in your organization.
As always, your first step is to note down what you want to accomplish. You may have a high-level goal, such as improving resource allocation, or a very specific goal, like gaining a clear understanding of how your project managers’ abilities compare to the skills their roles demand.
We recommend reviewing small groups at a time, as this process can quickly become overwhelming if you take on too much at once. For example, you could map the skills of
Here’s the fun part — gathering the data you’ll be ‘mapping’!
You’ll start by creating a list of the skills required by each job role you’re assessing. You can gather this information by reviewing existing job descriptions, asking team members what skills they feel are essential to their roles, and researching industry trends.
The next step is to gather information on the skills each member possesses currently. You can find this information through:
When analyzing skills, it’s important to look at both technical and soft skills. Hard or technical skills cover role-specific knowledge (e.g., computer programs, programming languages, project management processes, etc.), while soft skills include harder-to-measure essential skills, like communication, conflict resolution, and team leadership.
Sure, you can use a spreadsheet to track your workforce’s skills. But we’re lucky enough to live in a time where skills management software specifically designed for this purpose already exists.
For example, Runn’s skill management features allow you to report on this information by creating a centralized database for all your skill data. Not only can you assign individual skills and skill levels to workers in a couple of clicks, but you can produce helpful reports providing comprehensive insights on how specific skills are utilized and more.
The bottom line? Skills management software makes it easier than ever to track, map, and analyze your organization’s skills.
Skills matrices, a tool for tracking employees’ skills and competencies, are here to help make the process of mapping skills tangible.
Your skills matrix acts as a searchable database of employees’ skills, qualifications, and proficiency levels, helping resource managers quickly identify which team members have the right skills to take on specific projects or tasks.
Creating a competency matrix helps inform skills tracking by formalizing the process of storing skill data and removes subjectivity from the process by providing a standardized method of measuring aptitude.
The final step is to make skill mapping an essential part of your resource management process by using these valuable insights to:
Remember, you’ll need to regularly refresh your data to ensure that your skills matrices reflect your organization's current needs and workforce's ability.
Truly understanding and utilizing the unique abilities within your workforce can seem like a tricky task to get a handle on - concepts like "proficiency" and "competence" naturally feel somewhat subjective and difficult to judge.
But systematically identifying, documenting, and analyzing employee skills using skills mapping removes some of the vagueness, and clarifies these ideas so that they may be brought into play while making resource management decisions.
As a result, your organization can make more informed moves to enhance workforce planning, foster targeted talent development, and boost overall productivity.
Embrace skills mapping today, and transform how you manage your most valuable asset: your people.
