Imagine a team where every member knows their strengths, weaknesses, and what they need to learn to reach their full potential. This is the power of skill mapping, a strategy becoming indispensable in our fast-paced work environment. With GenAI tools like ChatGPT and integration with workplace or performance management software, you’re just a few steps away from harnessing the power of becoming a skills-based organization.
👉 Connect with me on Linkedin to share ideas and feedback!
Why should you even consider mapping all the skills of your team members? It takes a lot of time, and one skill map can easily span across hundreds of rows in a spreadsheet. But then again, we see more and more studies arise showing the importance of becoming a skills-based organization. Here are some of the benefits they uncovered in a global Deloitte survey of more than 1,200 professionals:
Skill mapping isn't just about understanding abilities; it's about aligning them with evolving market needs and staying agile in a competitive landscape.
Meanwhile, 81% of business executives say work is increasingly performed across functional boundaries.
Becoming a skills-based organization is not just a matter of mapping the skills in your teams and departments. It’s essential to align the skills you map to the business goals, behaviours and learning goals required to achieve real impact. Companies that do this effectively can expand their talent pool by as much as 10 times and recruit and staff projects faster with internal or external hiring efforts.
Although there are some universally accepted competency models for more mature skills, we see that their definitions are often outdated or the model is not updated with the latest skills that arise with new tech and business innovation. Therefore, we are left to our own expertise when it comes to defining these skill maps. As a result, we see three common issues arise that can be solved by using generative AI.
Generative AI provides an excellent solution for these three issues, since it synthesizes its recommendations from many references and prioritizes them based on frequency and relevance.
Rather than going through lengthy processes of interviewing employees, and experts in the field and reviewing job and project descriptions, we recommend using a bit of ChatGPT magic to get your first version set up in no time. By using the prompt included in our toolkit, you can easily create skills maps for any domain. Here’s what you need to have to get started:
⚙️ Click here to download the toolkit
Next up, you need to present your skills map to your team. Using a collaborative tool such as Microsoft Online, Google Sheets or Miro you can collect feedback on each piece and use this to refine and validate the map. Next up, we need to cover the following steps:
You can use the spreadsheet in the toolkit to map your team's skills based on perception, but in case you want to use assessments to set the level, you can use a platform like Workera.
Integrating your skills map with tools like Microsoft Viva or other workplace tools transforms it from a static document into a living strategy.
If you don’t have access to something like Microsoft Viva, you can use your project management tool to tag projects with skills that are needed and let employees follow these tags if they want to learn about them. Alternatively, you can let employees add skills to their profiles on Slack or projects in Jira/Trello/Atlassian, so others can see them on the go.
You now have the tools and knowledge to create a skills map that's not just a plan but a pathway to growth and success. Embrace these strategies, integrate them with your corporate environment, and watch your team evolve into a powerhouse of relevant, up-to-date skills.