November 8, 2024
Talent mapping shifts the focus from jobs to skills, which contributes to creating an agile workforce that is resilient in the face of change.
Are you making the most of your workforce’s talents? Probably not. There is no harm in admitting it – in fact, acknowledging this issue is the first step to correcting it. Unlocking the full potential of one’s talent pool requires a strategic skills-based approach.
Talent mapping is an HR tool that aligns employees’ current skills with their potential for growth and has proved effective in creating skilled and highly agile teams. This article aims to help you understand what talent mapping means and how your organisation can benefit from deploying it.
Talent mapping helps organisations identify and analyse the skills, competencies, prospects, and career aspirations of their workforce. It aims to place employees in roles that serve the organisation’s short and long-term goals and vision in the best possible way. As a workforce strategy, talent mapping in human resource management serves a distinct purpose – to gain an in-depth understanding of the organisation’s talent landscape and use this knowledge to inform decisions on talent optimisation and development, and succession planning.
Talent mapping is a fundamental component of talent management, an HR process that is aimed at attracting, developing, and retaining high-performing employees. The talent mapping process involves gathering data on employees’ skills and competencies, experience, ambitions, and objectives. Leaders use and assess this data to reveal each individual’s existing skills as well as their prospects of learning new skills and taking on new responsibilities. Conducting a skills gap analysis to identify missing skills, especially those that are critical to the business, is also intrinsic to the talent mapping process. An effective talent mapping strategy isn’t complete without a sustained effort by the organisation to fill those critical skills gaps through the right talent development opportunities.
The term talent mapping is often used interchangeably with skills mapping and competency mapping. The three are closely related and share the same fundamentals – gathering data on skills and competencies and assessing skills gaps to make sure employees are matched with tasks where they can be their most effective selves. However, there are subtle differences that set the three apart. These variations mostly pertain to the outcome of each process. Here’s how:
Talent mapping in talent management shifts the focus from jobs to skills. This contributes to creating an agile workforce that is resilient in the face of change and challenges. Here, we list four top benefits of talent mapping:
1. Holistic employee growth
In a report by the Gloat Research Group, 54% of employees said their current roles do not make the most of their skill sets. Such workers are bound to be unhappy and disengaged at work and will naturally look for opportunities elsewhere. Talent mapping reduces disengagement not only by helping employees fit right into their roles but also by empowering them to take control of carving their own career paths within the organisation. Talent mapping provides regular and relevant skill-building and internal mobility opportunities so that employees can expand their skill sets, avail of wider opportunities within the organisation both vertically and laterally, and in the process experience holistic development. The result of this would be a highly engaged workforce that, in turn, benefits the organisation as it gains a rich talent pool that never gets depleted. What’s more, it gets into the habit of identifying and acquiring core skills early on, which is advantageous to the organisation.
2. Organisational agility
Skills-based organisations are 57% more likely to anticipate and respond effectively to change. This statistic tells us that talent mapping, with its skills-first approach, is critical for building an agile business that adapts swiftly to technological disruptions and new market dynamics and is resilient in any crisis. When they begin to truly understand talent mapping, business leaders develop a mindset where they acknowledge that they must continuously acquire new skills and embrace new technologies to keep pace with the changing times. By making deployment choices based on skills and competencies rather than seniority and job titles, they can help the business pivot quickly to new demands and challenges. Another advantage of talent mapping is that it keeps recruitments internal, avoiding the lengthy processes and high costs associated with hiring externally.
3. Productivity boost
Talent mapping encourages collaboration, flexibility, and versatility by breaking down jobs into projects, roles, and gigs. Armed with new skills and the freedom to pursue their interests and goals, growth-oriented employees can grab the chance to take on a role or be part of a project that challenges them and allows them to make a greater impact in the organisation. Skills-based organisations use talent mapping to create opportunities for employees to move fluidly between projects and teams without titles and departments getting in the way. Such an exercise unlocks better prospects for the workforce, which translates to a jump in productivity and performance for the organisation as a whole. Studies (such as this one) show a direct correlation between effective talent management practices and productivity.
4. Strategic workforce planning
Strategic workforce planning is the process of identifying talent needs with an eye on current and future business goals. To be effective, strategic workforce planning relies on good talent management, which skills-based talent mapping can provide. When an organisation merges a good talent strategy with its strategic workforce planning efforts, the chances of meeting critical talent demands in alignment with broader business goals are that much higher.
How does talent mapping achieve this?
Well, talent mapping helps identify and predict critical skills gaps so that these can be filled in good time, whether by recruitment or through a dedicated training and development programme. Team leaders and managers are able to anticipate future workforce needs and work towards fulfilling them. They also gain the foresight to identify emerging skills, which allows them to figure out what rival companies are doing to acquire those future skills. With this window to the future now open, they can analyse their current workforce and skills gap data to come up with effective talent and skill-building strategies.
Furthermore, talent mapping gives a major push to succession planning, which is a critical component of strategic workforce planning. With talent mapping, HR leaders can identify candidates with innate talent who can be groomed to occupy leadership roles in the future.
While it’s clear that identifying critical skills and skills gaps is a talent mapping prerequisite, the reality is that many companies don’t know the first thing about it. According to PwC’s 2021 Future of Work and Skills Survey, the respondents said identifying the skills they need in the future was their second-biggest challenge while only one in four expressed confidence that they could pinpoint these critical skills. Given these genuine challenges, companies need a helping hand – a tech solution like MuchSkills, for instance. Here are some MuchSkills tools you can use to get your talent mapping journey going:
Usually, an organisation’s workforce data is scattered across multiple HR platforms and documents. This is a hurdle to talent mapping. The first thing to tackle, therefore, is to ensure all employee skills data is on a single platform for easy access and viewing. Enter MuchSkills, a software management platform that presents all the skills, competencies, skill levels, interest levels, certifications, and skill distribution available in the organisation in a visually-pleasing and easy-to-consume skills matrix. Our software enables you to create a list of core skills relevant to your business along with employees who possess these skills and competencies, their proficiency levels for each skill, and any certifications they might possess. This provides you with organisation skills intelligence at your fingertips.
MuchSkills define three levels of skills proficiency – beginner, intermediate, and expert – helping you understand where each employee stands. These levels are colour-coded for better visualisation. Plus, we have a convenient in-built tracking feature that tells you if the listed certifications are active or have lapsed.
As a talent mapping tool, the MuchSkills Skills Matrix allows team leaders and decision-makers to strategically identify, assess, and analyse skills and competencies for a specific role, team, department, or even the entire organisation and to monitor them on a regular basis.
To know more about how to create a modern skills matrix, read our article ‘What is a skills matrix and how do you create one?’
If one half of the talent mapping spectrum comprises skills mapping and competency mapping, the other half is about identifying missing skills essential to your business now and in the foreseeable future. The tech support you need for this is a good skills gap analysis tool. Here’s how MuchSkills can help you perform a skills gap analysis. Once you have a skills matrix in place and you have also drawn up a list of skills essential to meet your business objectives, you can do the following on MuchSkills:
A skills gap analysis isn’t complete without a strong strategy on bridging those critical skills gaps through relevant skill-building efforts. Deploying talent mapping in training and development initiatives encourages a culture of continuous learning, which further strengthens the organisation’s strategic workforce planning programme.
The shift to skills-based hiring: How leading companies are rewriting workforce strategies
As talent mapping and strategic workforce planning evolve, many companies are recognising that aligning roles with the right skills, rather than just formal education, is key to driving growth and innovation. This shift is reflected in the hiring strategies of industry leaders who now prioritise skills over degrees, reshaping the way they identify and nurture talent.
Many large organisations – Google, Microsoft, Apple, Starbucks, and Penguin Random House, to name a few – have adopted such a talent strategy to take advantage of its many benefits. In recent years, all these companies have announced a relaxation in the number of jobs that require a college degree.
In an interview in 2023, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the people he hires includes “people who have college degrees, people who don’t, people who code, people who don’t”. Speaking about the qualities he most looks for in a candidate, Cook listed soft skills such as collaboration, curiosity, and creativity. The shift in Apple’s workforce criteria from degrees to skills has been around for a while. Back in 2019, Cook famously expressed pride in the fact that half of Apple’s US hires in the previous year did not have four-year degrees. He went on to explain that certain in-demand skills – such as coding – aren’t always learnt in college.
In 2023, education-focused online magazine Intelligent.com conducted a survey of US employers on the subject of college degree requirements. Among the respondents, 55% claimed to have eliminated bachelor’s degree requirements for some positions – from entry-level to senior posts – while 45% said they planned to follow suit in 2024. Instead of fixating on educational qualifications, many of these companies said they preferred to rely on personality tests or test assignments at the time of hiring. Furthermore, three in four employers advocated certification programmes as viable alternatives to a traditional college education. These findings match the sentiment of another famous CEO, Tesla’s Elon Musk, who in a 2020 job announcement for an AI researcher on X said “educational background is irrelevant, but all must pass hard-core coding test”.
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