Building a personalized skills framework in 6 steps
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Estelle
Content manager
May 24, 2021
5 min
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Have a skills mapping consolidated is imperative to guarantee the efficiency of your activity and your projects. This map is based on a competency framework, compiling all the expertise present in your organization.
A competency framework is a list of skills pre-established by a company. It is on this list that the skills mapping. Employees can go through this framework and indicate the skills that are specific to them.
The objective of a reference framework is therefore to establish a list of operational skills that will allow you to position your teams on your various projects while taking into account their aspirations. In particular, it serves as a common language for your entire company, the basis of HR and operational strategies. It also gives all employees the opportunity to identify their skills within the framework and to determine which ones they lack in order to evolve. In fact, it is important to take care of your company's reference system.
So where do you start? How to build a personalized framework that can be acted upon by your employees?
Napta gives you its method and its best advice to build a competency framework adapted to your business in just 6 steps.
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Your competency framework, as we saw above, is the basis for skills mapping in your business. But for this framework to perfectly fulfill its functions, it is essential to determine the objectives of its use in advance.
Obviously, you will build your framework so that it meets your goals. It will therefore be different depending on the goals you have set, such as:
In summary, before you start building your repository, make sure you have determined what specific needs it should meet.
đź’ˇ At Napta, we support our customers in this crucial stage by detailing their goals and needs with them.
To be as accurate as possible and faithful to the reality on the ground, your skills framework must imperatively contain all the skills present in your company without exception. To do this, you will have to survey all the departments/services in your organization and collect for each of them the skills held by the employees.
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Tip: if the objective of your skills mapping is to visualize the skills that are missing in your structure and therefore, establish recruitment and/or training plans, consider also listing the skills that are not necessary, but still available within your teams to add them to the repository!
đź’ˇ Tip: involve team managers, they are in the best position to know the skills present in their team!
One of the objectives inherent in any skills mapping is to have a common language for all the stakeholders in your company. For your repository to perform this function correctly, it is not enough to list the skills in a document or tool as you collected them. Now that you have this valuable list, you should smooth it out to make it perfectly understandable by your employees: check that the competency labels are self-supporting.
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From the first reading, your employees must understand specifically what expertise a skill corresponds to.
→ For operational competence in human resources, the term “resource management” is not explicit enough. It could be the management of budgetary resources, human resources, material resources... It is therefore preferable to specify “human resources management”.
→ You should also use acronyms when necessary: if your teams are used to using acronyms, they will expect to find them in the repository. For example: “User Experience (UX)” instead of putting only “User Experience” or “Artificial Intelligence (AI)” instead of putting only “Artificial Intelligence”.
Sometimes it's hard to accurately describe a skill on one line of wording. But to make your skills easily identifiable by your employees, you can associate a short description to put them in context. This makes it much easier for your employees to determine whether or not they have a skill.
For example, for the skill Agile project management, we could give the following description: “Knowledge and practice of agile methods (Scrum, Kanban, etc...)”.
Navigating through a list of 200 skills is not very easy User-Friendly. To facilitate research, we advise you to combine your skills under several categories. Here are some examples of categories under which you could categorize the competencies in your framework:
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Attention: make sure your categories cover all skills present in your various departments, so that all your teams can easily find their way around.
đź’ˇ Tip: At Napta, we recommend that our customers create 10 to 25 categories, with an average of 15 skills per category.
To have a perfectly actionable framework, one last step (but not the least) is necessary: digitize.
To be able to use your framework according to your goals and needs, it must be able to evolve and grow at the same time as your business. For this, there is only one solution: to have a digital and intelligent skills management tool.
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Make your skills mapping, it means that:
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💡 This stage is probably the most difficult to set up and maintain over the long term. At Napta, it is the role of our experts to ensure that your repository is updated and usable in real time. We share with you all the “best practices” and give employees the opportunity to suggest new skills to expand the framework thanks to our solution.‍
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Finally, when you want to build a framework that is perfectly adapted to the implementation of a skills mapping dynamic, consider surrounding yourself with experts who will advise you on the best practices to adopt and who will support you throughout your initiative.
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Do you want to go deeper into the subject? We have lots of resources at your disposal to help you go further.
In addition to this subject, find our template”The perfect load plan for a successful deployment.”
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Also discover our guides, templates and checklists in the Resources tab.
See you soon at Napta!
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Napta allows you to set up a skills map within your company and supports you in building your repository, according to your needs and objectives. To find out more, contact us!‍
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