Tool 8 – Team Skills Mapping

The eighth tool in the Emerging Stronger series helps us to work smarter on the top priority for L&D today – building skills.

New tools and technologies are creating and reinventing jobs faster than organisations can recruit for them. It is no wonder that skills are a top priority for leaders and people professionals alike. But addressing the skills agenda is a big task, involving an entire ecosystem of stakeholders both internal and external to the organisation. So where do we start?

This tool is a skills map. It has been designed for 

• department heads to map the skills needed in their team to achieve their priority goals
• L&D to get a deeper understanding on where to direct their attention to make the biggest difference.

Revisit principle: plan to simplify

When it comes to skills – we can’t do everything. We need to prioritise!

Complicated competency frameworks that take years to develop are out of date before they are even released. Instead we need to explore ways of taking action faster on the priorities that matter today.

Getting started

Shannon Tipton from the Emerging Stronger team created this tool as a framework to help us prioritise what matters to the business.

It takes us through 4 phases of the skills mapping process:

1. Setting the stage – working with team leads to identify the business’s or team’s future needs.
2. Collecting and analysing data to identify priority and crucial skills.
3. Evaluating team members against crucial skills.
4. Rating team members’ interest in learning new skills.

A tool to help!

Use the Team skills mapping tool when you need help to  

• Create a visual map of the priority skills needed to achieve the business goals

• Gain clarity and insight into strengths, gaps, and interests within the team

• Identify specialists, generalists, and how each individual’s skills can be applied across departments and across the organisation

• Discover current employees who need skills to act as temporary or permanent replacements

• Share knowledge across and within departments to help fill gaps in vacant positions

* The Team Skills Mapping Tool was created by Shannon Tipton as part of the Emerging Stronger toolkit to help L&D professionals thrive in the ever changing world of work. It was initially published in conjunction with our publishing partner Go1.