What Is Skill Mapping? Its Importance And Role
“When I say develop your skills, I don’t mean related to every business area of that industry. This is not very realistic. I mean, the field of your expertise in that industry.”
– Pooja Agnihotri
Skills play a key role in the performance and contribution of employees to the growth and development of the company. Businesses require team members with varying skillsets for the overall growth of the company. CEOs, managers, and other persons holding responsible positions in business are always on the hunt for skilled talent that can transform business working and boost productivity.
However, to succeed in today’s fierce competition, you not only need to hire top talent but also frequently assess the skills of your team members. This will help you in continuous improvement and identify potential gaps and scope for improvement. Further, utilizing their skills to their potential is necessary to ensure seamless growth of both the company and the individual. In this article, we will understand skill mapping and skill matrix, thereby developing a holistic approach toward assessing the core competencies of various team members, and leveraging this data for facilitating development opportunities and minimal recruiting costs.
What Is Skill Mapping?
Skill mapping refers to the process of identifying and assessing skills possessed by various employees in your organization. This process of mapping helps you to understand the skills of your employees and sorting them for various tasks.
Skill mapping plays a key role in pre-hiring forecasts and the onboarding process. You are able to assess candidates and assign them to different teams accordingly. Further, you can plan and organize necessary training programs accordingly for continuous and seamless skill development [1].
Importance Of Skill Mapping
Skill mapping contributes to the overall improvement in the productivity of the organization. Employees are able to work to their full potential and solve roadblocks with ease.
Key Aspects Of Skill Mapping
1. Make Members Aware Of Their Skills
An effective skill mapping activity will help you to identify skills in a particular team member. In a number of cases, employees themselves are not aware of the skills they possess. With detailed insights and reports, you are able to identify and refine the abilities of your team members. This helps them in streamlining their skills in a specific and useful direction that contributes successfully to personal development as well as to the organization.
2. Ensure Members Are Aware Of Their Responsibilities
There are a number of times when your team members are not even aware of their roles and responsibilities [2]. They continually work on their respective tasks without much understanding of the overall outcome for the company. This leads to fatigue and restlessness, without much improvement in personal performance or performance for the company. Skill mapping helps you to identify precisely how each team member is working; therefore, you can effectively focus on providing them with a proper road map for the overall improvement in performance.
3. Assess Hiring Requirements
In a number of cases, a shortage of skilled resources is the primary reason for the failure of projects. With effective skill mapping, you will be able to understand the resources you have at your disposal. You can plan any kind of hiring activity in advance, thereby ensuring that there is progress in task activities.
4. Monitor Overall Progress
With effective skill mapping, you would be able to monitor the overall growth and improvement in the performance of individuals. You can also use these pointers to understand their key contribution to the organization. You can identify the areas where your team members are performing exceptionally well, and identify areas for improvement. This will help you not only improve the overall performance of the company but also improve the retention rates, as members will feel that their skills are used to their full potential here.
5. Lower Workload
Just as I stated in the above point, skill mapping will provide you with resource utilization. This helps you to identify team members with a heavy workload. You can forecast various activities as per the basic workload to ensure that team members have a pleasant and smooth work experience. Overall, skill mapping plays a key role in taking data-driven decisions that leads to the comprehensive growth of the organization. By identifying skill gaps you are able to organize effective training, resulting in continuous improvement and growth of the organization.
Best Ways For Assessing Employee Skillsets And Core Competencies
Now that we have learned about skill mapping and its importance, let’s now look at the best ways to assess employee skillsets. There is not one perfect method for assessing employee skillset, but it is a continuous process and a combination of the two methods outlined below should help.
1. Analyzing KPIs
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are a qualitative method to measure the overall effectiveness and performance of members working in your team. They help you in identifying weak areas and assist you in creating a road map for improvement. KPIs play a vital role in assessing employee skillsets. You can start by setting realistic goals and then motivating your team members to achieve them.
Short-term goals help in assessing your team members’ performance effectively. When you have a clear understanding of the potential of your team members you can assign tasks and set goals with confidence. KPIs provide you with valuable qualitative insights that help you in evaluating task progression and create motivating road maps for the same. The evaluation also plays a key role in identifying weak points and ways to improve.
2. Feedback And Reviews
Feedback refers to the process of providing opinions or evaluations to team members, with the prime motive to improve their performance. A review is an assessment or evaluation mainly focused on providing decision-makers with potential information for making confident choices. When it comes to feedback, there are a number of different perspectives that arise. Let’s see a brief description of the most commonly used feedback mechanism:
- 360-degree feedback
This primarily focuses on collecting information and performance about a particular team member anonymously. This includes managers, peers, and others directly, as well as feedback indirectly related to the team members. This helps you in assessing behavior and specific training needs. - Customer feedback
This plays a crucial role in the overall growth and progress of a team. When you have a customer evaluate the performance of your team in a project, you have a better understanding of the pain points and how your team responded to them. This helps you in creating a road map with a better understanding of the skills displayed by your team members.
When it comes to reviewing, a one-to-one performance review offers continuous learning, guidance, and a defined road map toward improvement. One-to-one performance reviews are mostly held between managers and team members. These reviews should not be limited to just once a year. Regular and frequent reviews boost the morale of your team members by identifying their skillsets and motivating them to perform better.
Let us now discuss the sheer amount of time and money you could save by effectively using skill mapping to minimize the recruiting cost, by eliminating bad hires and improving employee retention.
Leveraging Employee Skillsets For Minimizing Recruiting Cost
A single bad hire could cost the company an average loss of about $15,000 and alarmingly, three in every four employers are affected by bad hires. Skill mapping helps in leveraging the skillset of your team members and identifying areas of improvement. You can achieve this by building a talent pool in advance. This is possible by hiring potential employees with skills and then providing them with continuous learning POS software [3]. This helps in improving the skills of the employees as well as improving retention rates.
Further, with efficient skill mapping, you would be able to identify gaps in your team. This helps you to effectively search for specific employees who would fill that particular gap. Internal transfers and mobility come into the frame because of precise skill mapping. You can readjust employees in your teams to meet the typical needs of your project. This helps in the seamless completion of project work as well as in creating a versatile and adaptable environment. This will help you in lowering the need for urgent external hiring, and provide you with adequate time for planning hiring activities, thereby ensuring that the employees you hire are perfectly necessary for your organization.
Bottom Line
By understanding the individual skillsets of team members you are able to create a confident work environment and instill a sense of continuous growth and improvement in your employees. Further, when you are able to identify weak spots in performance, you are able to build an environment of positive work culture with adaptability and flexibility. This ensures that your team members are aware of their individual roles and responsibilities, thereby ensuring continuous improvement in the quality of the project delivered.
