Skills Mapping: Insights for Your Talent Training

One of the essential factors that determine the success of a business is people; more specifically, their talent and skills. Assigning the task to the right person, you’ll get the most out of their abilities to complete it perfectly. However, around 48% of business leaders are concerned about significant skill gaps. This means that investing in upskilling your team is a must.

While the task might seem challenging when there are dozens or even hundreds of employees, there is a way to build a comprehensive and worthwhile team training track with a high level of employee engagement — a skills mapping exercise. In this article, we’ll delve into the meaning of skills mapping and share some insights on how to upskill your team most efficiently.

What Is Skills Mapping?

Basically, skills mapping is the process of identifying and analyzing existing skills of your employees, predicting the skills your company will need in the future, uncovering skill gaps, and then visualizing all this data.

Such an analysis reveals the strengths and weaknesses of both your teams and the company as a whole. As a result, you get a full image of how good your human resources are, how you can improve their skills, and what training will have the greatest impact.

More Benefits of Skills Mapping

Besides understanding how talented your employees may or may not be, there are many more benefits that skills mapping brings. Let’s discover some of these advantages.

Visualizing your company’s path

The skills mapping process requires a certain analysis of the existing level of the skills your employees have and if it matches your business strategy. To do this, you need to have a clear understanding of your current business goals and needs. Once you compare these goals with your team’s skills, you’ll be able to verify if your team is capable of helping you on this journey, which team members can help you the most, and who needs additional hard or soft skills training. By knowing what you need and what skills are there already, you’ll be able to allocate your resources in a way that allows them to skyrocket your business results.

Identifying skill gaps that keep you from winning it all

Besides finding out skill gaps of certain employees (this can be cured with good training), you’ll probably discover bigger gaps. For some goals and projects, you might need some brand-new skills that none of your employees master, or may simply need a bigger team, or a different point of view. But there’s no need to panic: finding out that you lack needed resources is a perfect starting point for refining your talent and hiring process!

Sometimes, such insights turn everything inside out, and the business owner realizes that the organization needs a total change. Nevertheless, resolving these great skill gaps helps businesses make a breakthrough and overrun competitors.

Uncovering your hidden generalists and specialists

This is a very beneficial point for those business owners who want to optimize their processes by only assigning the right tasks to the right people. Let’s start with a short explanation. A specialist is an expert with deep knowledge in their subject, while a generalist is a professional with a range of diverse skills and a surprising mix of knowledge. Most businesses need both specialists for specific parts of your process, and generalists for unexpected challenging tasks.

For example, Instructional Designer skills are unique, so if you’re developing your own educational project, an expert is a must, even if their field of expertise is limited by their profession. In another instance, you might need someone who is good in their field but can also easily cover for a sales manager and only needs a quick sales communication training to do so.

If, upon reading this, you suddenly realize that you need to hire more generalists, look deeper into your team first by using skills mapping. O. C. Tanner claims that over half (52%) of employees identify as generalists, and these team members must be valued more than ever.

Determining individual plans for employee skills development

Now that you know the key goals of your business, have learned something about the skills of your team, and found out who the generalists and specialists are, it’s time to upskill your team. Skills mapping makes the choice of the training much easier and much more efficient: you can purchase or create a unique training workflow that will fit individual employees or choose the one training program that will fit the whole team and help your business grow.

Monitoring progress in different teams

After conducting skills mapping, you hold all the cards, which will make the assessment process easier. With a good skills mapping tool or even by using simple Excel spreadsheets, you can visualize your data according to different teams and compare the initial and after-training skills levels. This is a great way to either see if your teams succeed or realize that something is wrong with your training track.

Now that we know enough about the benefits of skills mapping and how we can utilize the method, let’s learn it more deeply.

Two Recognized Options for the Skills Mapping Process

If your team has more than a couple of employees, then you know that collecting all skills data and assessing them would be a challenge. For this reason, two convenient skills mapping matrices were developed and are now used all over the world: the Capability Matrix and the Competency Matrix. But before we continue, here’s a summary of the difference between skills, capabilities, and competencies. 

Skills usually refer to individual abilities like design or firefighting and can be hard or soft. Capabilities are usually a mix of different skills that complement each other, like firefighting with a deep knowledge of safety. Competency is a more complex thing that signifies the application of the abilities. A good example here is being a great firefighter who has enough personal qualities and experience to manage a force majeure situation. In the office world, competency includes knowing which instruments can be used in creating images for a certain project.

Capability/Skills Matrix

The Capability Matrix or Skills Matrix is a simple list of skills that you expect (or wish) your team had and the rating of your employees’ skill level. To create such a table, you need to determine the list of skills and then rate your employees like this:

• 0 = Has no idea how to do it
• 1 = Has a general level of skill/knowledge
• 2 = Can handle certain tasks requiring this skill
• 3 = Is an expert

You can add any other ratings you wish to the same table: the level of an employee’s interest in a certain skill, the urgency to train this skill, etc. Paint it, use commas, or organize your skills mapping process another way — the key point will still be to collect all your employee skill level data into a single table.

Competency Matrix

This is basically the same table as the one for the Skills Matrix, but the idea is slightly different. While you assess the level of employee skills or knowledge in the first table, the Competency Matrix assesses the general capability of the employee to complete a certain task. This helps in resource allocation and task assignment.

Which skills matrix suits me the best?

Actually, you need both. However, sometimes one of the options fits better. For example, when the market in your field changes quickly and you know that you need brand new skills in your team, use a Skills Matrix that will show you what your employees lack and probably which outdated skills can be exchanged for new ones.

In case no external force like an ever-changing market pushes you and all you need is to allocate tasks properly and upskill your team, use a competency matrix. With this option, you will uncover the strongest experts, the most flexible and ready-to-go generalists, and more useful data to form a perfect team that’s prepared to grow further.

Both of these matrices can also be helpful when accounting for a corporate learning ROI. All you need to do is create a one-source assessment system of the skills and competencies and then use this data as a result to account for your perfect ROI.

Where do I get a good skills mapping template?

Most businesses today value adaptability, problem-solving, and IT skills as their core priorities in employee training. This is in tune with recommendations of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) which expects some hard and soft skills to be in need by 2033. You can assess these or other skills with the following matrix template that our expert team prepared:

Download the iSpring Skills Matrix template

Tips to Successfully Practice Skills Mapping

Having a template is great, although businesses that are organizing skills mapping often yield irrelevant data or unclear results. To avoid this, we invite you to consider the following tips based on our experience and the insights we received through multiple skills mapping processes.

Perform a skills assessment test

Begin your journey with a thorough assessment of each employee using the iSpring Skills Matrix template. Remember that only asking your team members is not enough. Offer them questionnaires, assess their previous experience, and review their existing projects. You can even introduce some testing or exams; this is particularly easy if you use a good LMS like iSpring Learn.

Strive for objectivity

Never trust only one source. In case you’re unsure if the result you got is correct, retest an employee, request their line managers or colleagues for feedback on their work, and seek other insights to make sure that the level of competency is transparent.

Focus on relevant skills

Don’t over-engineer your skills mapping: assess only those employee skills that would be really useful for your business’s success. Excessive skills would make the accounting of the result more complicated and would distract you from the really important points.

For example, in case you work in the application development field and need to assess the development team only, avoid including “extra” competencies like sales, communications, and so on. However, if you need a sales manager that is not in your team yet, include this skill in the matrix and find out if one of your employees already has the needed knowledge. In this case, you’ll be able to provide them with sales skills improvement and get a trusted sales manager.

Include a mixture of hard and soft skills

Whatever field you work in, the modern market requires deep soft skills from employees as well as strong technical skills. Continuing the idea of finding more generalists, consider including both hard and soft skills in your matrix, as this will show the full picture of your team’s competencies.

Limit how many employees you include in a matrix

We know you want to analyze it all, and quickly. But don’t rush it: big journeys start with small steps. In case you include too many employees in your assessment, it will take time to analyze, you can encounter some human error, but still won’t use the entire amount of data. Start with one department that you want to improve, or even select a dozen employees to test the matrix that’s been chosen. Once you’re sure you got the result you expected, continue expanding it to cover all departments.

Consider using skills management software

A good way to embrace data on many employees easily is to avoid manual analysis. Today’s skill assessment tools market offers a range of comprehensive solutions that can help you automate everything from collecting the questionnaires to taking exams and even analysis.

Basically, many last-gen LMSs can become great skills mapping platforms for your team. For example, iSpring Learn is a reliable cloud solution that has an employee performance appraisal module engineered to thoroughly assess the knowledge and competency of learners. All you need to do is create your tests and exams, and the solution will soon uncover all the skill gaps your team has.

More Reasons to Practice the Skills Mapping Exercise

As the world keeps changing, skills that employees currently have get outdated very quickly; back in 2023, Joe McKendrick, the AI Evangelist, supposed that many skills would become irrelevant in 2025. And look at us today: with the development of AI and other technologies, we have to change quickly: either learn the new skills of using these technologies or change our field completely. Both require assessing the existing level of skills and comparing it to what’s needed today.

But there’s more to come, and the big data collected through skills mapping will get more and more challenging to read. That’s why it’s important to automate this process and make it more convenient with the help of LMSs and other skills mapping tools. 

If you want to reskill your employees quickly and with a guaranteed result, you’ll need two things: deep skills mapping to find out the gaps and strengths, and a nice customizable skills mapping LMS. And there’s always a chance for double dipping with the iSpring Learn LMS. Want to try it out? Book a free iSpring Learn demo right now.