Skills mapping is a technique for identifying, assessing, and documenting employee skills across an organization. Its purpose is to understand employees’ abilities and their business value, as well as how these skills align with organizational needs. The end product is a visual or digital representation of current employees’ skills — i.e., a skills map.
HR can use the skills mapping process for a particular project or to reveal a workforce’s overall skills and skills gaps. From there, distributing work, determining training needs, or hiring talent can be done in an informed manner.
Although they sound similar, skills mapping is not the same as skills-based talent mapping. Skills mapping is a tool for informing skills-based talent mapping at an organizational level.
Although they sound similar, skills mapping is not the same as skills-based talent mapping. Skills mapping is a tool for informing skills-based talent mapping at an organizational level.
Why skills mapping is important
- Provide a strategic overview of workforce skills: Understanding which skills are available and which are lacking is the starting point for involving leadership and planning for the future.
- Ensure skills coverage of critical and scarce roles: Knowing whether you have employees with crucial skills or need to find people who do will help you prepare for upcoming needs and potential key employee departures.
- Enhance employee engagement: Knowing employees’ strengths allows their managers to assign them tasks or place them in roles they can thrive in, leading to increased productivity and engagement.
- Align skills with business strategy: Once you know which skills employees have and need, you can plan to leverage them to meet business goals.
- Support succession planning: Pinpointing workforce skills gaps allows you to implement focused training programs and hiring strategies to meet future business needs.
- Facilitate smoother transitions: Insights into employees’ capabilities make it easier to decide what changes to make and how to better prepare your workforce for the transition.
- Cultivate organizational agility: In-depth knowledge of employees’ skills allows you and your organization to respond better and more promptly to unexpected circumstances.
3 key matrices in skills mapping
A skills matrix is a table that compares skills and other data vertically and horizontally. Skills are listed on one axis, and roles/employee names are displayed on the other axis. This depiction helps you analyze and visualize skills data to answer certain questions.
Here are three skills matrix examples:
Here are three skills matrix examples:
- Skills (inventory) matrix: Employees are plotted to skills at various proficiency levels according to a rating scale, depicting overall coverage.
- Skills gap matrix: This compares current employee skills with the required skills, helping to identify training and development priorities.
- Skills vs. roles matrix: This lays out the skills required per role to indicate any overlap in skills across roles and identify skills deployment and development opportunities.
Steps HR can take to implement skills mapping
Step 1: Clearly define the objectives
While there are many reasons HR might need to conduct a skills mapping exercise, it’s best to start by looking at the business’s strategic goals and breaking them down into actionable areas. For instance, if the business wants to expand into new markets, localized expertise in marketing and sales would be required in those areas.
Aligning skills mapping objectives with strategic goals helps ensure it directly impacts the business. In addition, starting with business goals makes it easier to gain support and buy-in from leadership.
Here are a few example objectives:
- Assess whether a team has the right skills for a new project
- Understand what skills were missing from a team that failed at a project
- Discover the most prevalent or absent skills in your workforce
- Use skills data to inform training and development programs.
Step 2: Present the business case for skills mapping
Every HR initiative must have a valid motive. Start your skills mapping process by preparing a compelling business case for it. This should include a rundown of the available skills your company can tap into, as well as the skills gaps in the organization.
You should also detail what the project will accomplish, who will be involved, and how it aligns with business goals. You can further strengthen your case by identifying internal candidates for leadership and other critical roles and highlighting how this will lower recruitment costs and increase efficiency.
Step 3: Get leadership buy-in
It’s critical to involve leadership when defining objectives and scope. They must have a clear understanding of how it will affect their direct areas and be able to provide valuable insights into critical roles or skills and future workforce requirements.
Leadership input also helps ensure better alignment with strategic goals and critical skill prioritization. When leaders are actively involved in this part of the process, they become champions for the initiative, increasing buy-in from the rest of the organization.
Step 4: Define a skills mapping process
When defining your skills mapping process, consider the following key points:
- Set the criteria and evaluation scale for proficiency levels. (i.e., no experience, general ability, intermediate ability, advanced ability)
- Determine how you will collect skills data (i.e., skills tests, self-assessments, manager evaluations)
- For larger organizations, decide how to categorize employees (i.e., level, team, department).
Step 5: Involve key stakeholders
No matter how much thought you put into an initiative, it’s impossible to factor in all the variables without stakeholder involvement. Engage with your HR team, department heads, managers, and employees to explain the purpose of skills mapping so you can gather their input.
Step 6: Develop a skills inventory/library/taxonomy
At this point, you must name each skill you want to map. Every skill included in your skills inventory should be relevant to their respective role and necessary for the company’s future success. It can help place them in categories such as technical skills, leadership skills, and soft skills.
Categorizing skills ensures the inventory captures a comprehensive range of abilities, enabling you to identify the specific capabilities required in different roles across the organization. A well-structured skills inventory also establishes a standardized framework you can use to assess employees’ abilities accurately and identify skill gaps.
In the long term, this inventory can be a strategic tool for talent management, performance evaluation, and succession planning. The skills taxonomy can be used to track employees’ progress over time and their contributions to the organization’s evolving needs.
This helps ensure the company remains competitive by keeping the workforce aligned with industry trends and technological advancements. Additionally, it fosters an agile, adaptable workforce where skills are constantly refined to support growth and innovation.
Step 7: Decide on the appropriate technology and tools to use
Automation reduces errors in the skills mapping process — you just have to find the technology that best suits the organization’s size, culture, and objectives.
Spreadsheets and standard HR software can be sufficient for assessing skills and visualizing the results in small organizations. However, larger organizations will likely need targeted skills mapping tools.
Specialized skills mapping software programs offer a standardized framework and the flexibility to produce a more comprehensive portrayal of employee skills. They also make it easier to access and update the data. Some platforms can even integrate with your HRIS (HR information system). Look for user-friendly options with a visually appealing skills matrix format.
Step 8: Communicate the process and tools to employees and managers
Explain the purpose of the skills mapping exercise and how participants can do their part. It’s especially important that managers understand the reasons for and technical aspects of the process. This way, they can better train and support their team members.
Show appreciation for employees’ efforts and contributions, reminding them that the exercise will support career mapping and skills development, which will benefit them in the long run. Be sure to also address privacy and confidentiality concerns by specifying what data you will collect and how you’ll use it.
Step 9: Conduct skills assessments
Using multiple skills assessment methods (e.g., skills tests, self-assessments, and manager evaluations) offers different perspectives that can be useful to the process. Every assessment be consistent and have safeguards against bias and inaccuracies.
Additionally, different teams or individuals may require different types of tests, depending on the required skills for their roles. You should also organize the data you collect from these assessments in a structured format, such as mapping skills by team or department. This allows you to isolate certain groups for concentrated analysis if necessary.
Annelise says: “It’s best to use a simple rating scale (e.g., beginner, intermediate, advanced, and expert) and outline the specific behaviors, knowledge, and outcomes at each level. When creating these categories, be very specific about what differentiates performance on different levels to make it easy to identify proficiency and development needs.”
Step 10: Analyze data to identify skills coverage and gaps
Skills assessments generate an abundance of data, so you need to focus on your objectives when analyzing this data. Creating various skills matrices can help to visualize it and make it easier to discuss with stakeholders. Look for trends, themes, and gaps in your data analysis, such as:
- Overall weakest/strongest skills in the organization
- Highly skilled employees
- Missing but required skills in underperforming teams
- Opportunities where employees’ skills can be used in other departments or functions
- Prevalence of skills in roles that don’t require them.
Step 11: Define strategies to deploy skills and close skills gaps
Once you know where the skills gaps and proficiencies are, you can begin devising strategies to address them. These strategies may include:
- Training employees who need to learn the required skill
- Coaching highly skilled employees to prepare them for leadership
- Introducing or upgrading digital tools to deliver on-the-job training
- Sponsoring employees to complete further education or specialized certificate programs
- Developing a plan for highly skilled employees to mentor less proficient employees
- Recruiting candidates with a particular expertise aligned with business goals.
👉🏻Download Free skills matrix template
Skills mapping is a powerful tool that allows organizations to better understand and use their workforce’s abilities. It provides a clear picture of current skills and skills gaps to equips you and your company’s leadership to make more informed decisions. It also makes adapting and staying competitive easier.
Whether you’re aiming to sharpen your workforce’s capabilities or preparing your organization for change, skills mapping provides the necessary insights for success.
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