Analyze the present to better prepare for the future with skills mapping

By Jennifer Montérémal

Published: February 20, 2025

There's no secret about it: successful companies are those that make the most of their employees' skills. Ensuring you have the right profile for the right job increases your chances of achieving your business objectives.

At the same time, employees increasingly fear boredom at work. They want to see their potential fully exploited.

Faced with these challenges, HR departments are evolving and integrating more and more GPEC (Gestion Prévisionnelle des Emplois et des Compétences) into their day-to-day processes. One of the resulting tasks is to draw up a skills map.

This method makes it easier for human resources to identify and understand employee skills, and then deploy strategies accordingly.

Definition, challenges, stages... learn more about the subject in our article! 🚀

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Competency mapping: definition

What is a competency map?

Skills mapping refers to a structured method for identifying, assessing and then listing all the skills present in a company.

The result is a " competency map " in the form of a structured table (see model at the bottom of the article 👇), also known as a grid or matrix. However, some HR professionals prefer the mindmap format.

Skills mapping is traditionally part of a GPEC approach, evolving more and more towards GEPP (Gestion des Emplois et des Parcours Professionnels). The aim of the latter is to help employees progress:

to ensure their professional development;
while palliating the needs of the organization.

💡 Note: skills mapping includes both hard and soft skills. Mad skills, on the other hand, are less frequently included - the atypical, often creative know-how that is increasingly attracting the interest of recruiters.

Who needs skills mapping?

When we think of "skills mapping", we immediately think of " human resources ", since this tool directly serves HR strategy and the GPEC approach. In particular, it can be used to anticipate recruitment needs and manage internal mobility.

However, this method also promises many advantages:

for training managers, who gain greater visibility of future needs ;
managers, who get to know their teams better, and know exactly who can do what;
employees, who become aware of both their strengths and areas for improvement.

Skills mapping and skills repository: what are the differences?

A skills repository is a document defining the set of skills required to fill each position within an organization.

The two concepts are therefore very similar, and above all complementary. 🤝

Indeed, skills mapping often relies on the skills repository to compare existing skills with those to be developed or acquired. Together, they ensure a match between the actual situation and the company's strategic needs.

Challenges and objectives of skills mapping

The primary aim of skills mapping is to draw up a precise inventory of current skills, by individual, team or department. This snapshot of the company's assets at any given moment simply reveals the differences between the skills required for a position and those actually possessed by the employee in charge of that same position.

This comparison will reveal some interesting facts:

Is the employee under-qualified? If so, it's best to plan a training program.
Over-qualified? In this case, it's in your interest to mobilize his or her skills for a position where they'll bring more value.

And if it's impossible to envisage an increase in skills or internal mobility, no problem, skills mapping also helps to anticipate recruitment needs.

💡 To wit: skills mapping serves to recognize, in a very concrete way, the know-how and interpersonal skills of teams. It therefore acts as a powerful instrument for motivating and engaging employees. This recognition of their work and qualities initiates dialogue around potential professional development opportunities!

What are the benefits for the company and its employees?

The benefits of skills mapping for the company

Thanks to skills mapping (especially if it's digitized!), managers have all this information centralized in one place. It's a useful decision-making tool, when it comes to preparing future resource allocation strategies.

At the same time, there are a number of other benefits:

this visualization of skills helps to break down silos, and thus encourages inter-team collaboration;
by promoting internal mobility and the development of existing skills, mapping limits the need for external recruitment, which is often costly;
this method provides a rapid response to unforeseen events, such as staff departures or the implementation of new projects;
you reduce the risks associated with dependency, by identifying the critical skills held by a single person;
you enhance your employer brand, because an organization that highlights its efforts to develop the skills of its employees reinforces its attractiveness to talent.

The benefits of skills mapping for employees

Having been in their jobs for some time, employees sometimes forget to take stock of their achievements and the road they still have to travel to the end of their careers. Competency mapping helps them to do just that, by revealing the skills they need to develop to go even further in their jobs.

☝️ This is clearly a way of promoting well-being in the workplace!

What's more, mapping helps to build a common foundation, so that all employees have the same level of knowledge and use a similar vocabulary when talking about skills. And that makes it much easier to work together on projects!

Finally, skills mapping strengthens interaction between colleagues by identifying complementary know-how. This brings us back to the need to break down silos, a key objective for companies wishing to capitalize on innovation and collective intelligence.

The 7 steps to skills mapping

#1 Determine objectives and scope of action

Competency mapping can serve a variety of purposes, such as :

identifying the company's gaps;
determining recruitment needs for the coming period;
drawing up a training plan;
setting up an internal mobility process.

So start by asking yourself what you're aiming for, by analyzing the major challenges ahead.

👉 F or example, if the organization wants to prepare its teams for the integration of a new technology, it will seek to identify the missing digital skills .

Of course, this work involves close collaboration with the relevant stakeholders, those working close enough to the ground to accurately anticipate future needs.

💡 Tip: at this stage, we also invite you to define the scope of your mapping. In fact, depending on the size of the company, you will either carry out the census by department, or for the organization as a whole.

#2 Identify the skills the company needs

Next, you need to list the hard and soft skills required for the various positions, making the link with the company's missions and strategic objectives.

☝️ Here too, it's important to work closely with the right people, in this case management, who have a fine-tuned vision of the teams under their responsibility.

💡 Tip: why not draw up the famous skills repository mentioned above?

#3 Take stock of employees' current skills

Once you know what the company needs, it's time to determine what skills it actually has.

There are several ways of doing this:

ask employees to assess themselves (beware of personal bias!);
invite managers to identify the skills of their teams, according to defined criteria;
hold individual interviews, which provide an opportunity to discuss the employee's skills... and not only!
conduct skills tests (practical exercises, simulations, etc.);
consult documentation, particularly CVs. In fact, CVs often contain know-how developed in previous positions, which the company has not yet had the opportunity to exploit.

#4 Analyze the gaps between current and required skills

At this stage, you have all the data you need to compare existing skills with those required to meet future needs.

However, this work may reveal quite a few "holes to fill". In this case, prioritize the most critical gaps, so that you can focus your actions on the most strategic skills gaps first.

#5 Represent the results visually

As a reminder, skills mapping should above all be practical and simplify the analysis of data associated with your employees' skills.

Combine all this information in a single document, in the form of your choice. Note, however, that the most common forms are :

matrices, i.e. Excel tables ;
mindmaps, which organize and link an individual's skills to specific categories or objectives.

💡 Tip: by using color coding, you'll apprehend significant discrepancies more quickly.

#6 Draw up an action plan

Once you've established the link between :

the organization's needs ;
and existing skills ;

you'll determine the solutions needed to close the gaps.

These solutions generally revolve around the following axes:

training and mentoring, which reinforce employee commitment through professional development ;
recruitment, the quick answer to integrating missing know-how;
internal mobility, also very well perceived by employees, since it enhances their careers.

💡 Worth knowing: as with any project roll-out, implementing these action plans involves:

planning the various related activities ;
allocating the necessary budgets and resources;
setting measurable objectives to monitor progress.

#7 Evaluate the success of your actions

Finally, it's important to measure the progress you've made thanks to the KPIs you've set up. In this way, you maintain the relevance of your skills mapping in the face of internal and external developments.

👉 This means, for example, making sure that training plans have borne fruit and have made up for skills shortages. Or that the right profiles have been recruited.

In all cases, only regular monitoring will reveal potential areas for improvement, and thus the corrective action required.

Example of a free Excel skills map

Need a little help? Appvizer can help you with this free skills mapping template, , which you can download in Excel format.

All that's left is for you to conduct a survey to complete it with data from your own employees. 🕵️

Which tool for skills mapping?

Traditional tools

If you're just starting out, it's perfectly possible to draw up your skills map using an Excel-type spreadsheet, especially if you can't afford to invest in more advanced software. Spreadsheets are, in fact, perfectly capable of structuring information, as well as analyzing it.

And for clearer, more visual representations, it's also possible to proceed via mindmap solutions.

☝️ Bear in mind, however, that these tools are essentially used to organize and visualize your skills map. In other words, in this context, all the preparatory work involved in identifying needs and listing skills must be carried out a la mano. The same applies to performance monitoring, since Excel, like mindmap software, remains relatively static. Not very practical for large organizations...

Specialized software

This is why companies with large-scale needs are quick to realize the benefits of using specialized software, whether it's a GPEC platform or an HRIS that includes a skills management component.

Here are just a few examples of what these solutions promise:

automation of skills collection, analysis and tracking processes;
centralization of all information in one place;
data flow to training implementation functionalities, to streamline operations;
continuous monitoring and updating of data.

🛠️ Skeely, for example, is a solution designed for interviews (annual, professional, follow-up, etc.) and GPEC. It takes care of managing your appraisal interviews from A to Z. All the data obtained during these exchanges is then centralized in the software to easily create your skills map. You can also use this map to set up your training plan, again directly in Skeely.