Skills Mapping Software: Simplified Skill & Competency Management

Managing your employees' skills effectively is critical to any organization’s success. As businesses scale, understanding the skills and competencies within your team becomes more challenging—and more important. That's where skills mapping software and competency mapping tools come in. These solutions not only help you track your team’s skills but also align them with the right projects, ensuring that your workforce is optimized for success.

In this blog, we'll explore what skill and competency mapping software is, the challenges faced by many companies, and how leveraging the right tools can streamline these processes, making your workforce management more efficient, accurate, and actionable.

What is Skills Mapping and Competency Mapping?

Skills mapping is the process of identifying, recording, and categorizing the specific skills of your workforce. This helps businesses understand their employees' capabilities and match them with appropriate projects. Competency mapping is very similar and, in some cases, synonymous with skills mapping. However, a key difference is that competency mapping typically connects individual skills to broader organizational expertise and business objectives.

The goal of both processes is the same: to ensure that the right people are aligned with the right tasks. When done effectively, skills mapping software and competency mapping allow organizations to strategically manage their teams, improve project outcomes, and identify areas for professional development.

The Challenges of Skills and Competency Mapping

While the benefits of skills mapping software and competency mapping are clear, the process is not without its challenges. Many organizations still rely on manual methods such as spreadsheets or siloed systems, which can lead to:

• Fragmented Data: Information about employee skills is scattered across different tools or departments, making it difficult to get a unified view.
  
  
• Data Accuracy: Keeping skills records up to date can be a time-consuming task, leading to outdated or incomplete information.
  
  
• Time-Consuming Processes: Managing skills data manually is inefficient and takes time away from more strategic tasks.
  
  
• Siloed Systems: Similar to the first point, many firms have separate databases for resumes, competencies, and skills, which creates additional complexity and increases the risk of mismatched or incomplete data.
  
  

This disjointed approach means that individuals are not on the same page (quite literally!), their skills aren’t captured accurately, and therefore they can’t be actioned effectively.

How Skills Mapping Software Can Solve These Challenges

By using specialized skills mapping software, these challenges can be easily overcome. Key benefits include:

• Centralized, searchable database: A unified database for your firm’s skills ensures that all your talent information is in one place. This makes it easier to search for specific skills and qualifications when you need them. Skill terminology is also managed in one place, resulting in an approved library of skills and skill levels.
  
  
• Intuitive updates: With a dedicated skills management software solution, skills and competency data can be easily updated. Users should be able to quickly toggle up years of experience or competency levels, and with more modern solutions, these updates can be automated.
  
  
• Improved resource allocation: With all your team's skills in one place, you can allocate resources more effectively, ensuring that the right people are working on the right projects.
  
  
• Scalability: As your organization grows, managing skills data manually becomes increasingly complex. Skills mapping software ensures that you can scale your workforce management without sacrificing efficiency.
  
  
• Integration with other tools: Many skills management platforms, including Flowcase, integrate seamlessly with other business systems, such as CRMs and ERPs, helping you manage your talent in conjunction with other workflows.

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‍Learn how Crayon use Flowcase to manage skills and competencies of 4,000+ employees →

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Streamlining Skills Mapping with Flowcase

Flowcase is designed to streamline the process of managing your team’s skills and competencies, making it easier than ever to match the right talent with the right project.

One of the core benefits of Flowcase is its ability to integrate resumes/CVs with skills mapping in a single, searchable database. This is important for two reasons. One, you no longer have to rely on separate systems to manage resumes and skills data. And two, employee updates are more streamlined, since they only have to update their details in one place. We talk about this in more depth in this blog.

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Key Features of Flowcase for Skills Mapping:

• Standardized Resume Input: Flowcase’s standardized resume builder ensures consistency and completeness across your team’s resumes. This makes it easier to compare candidates and assess skill sets.
  
  
• Metadata and Custom Fields: Linked to the above, Flowcase helps standardize the language used across your skills database with custom metadata and fields. Whether it’s specific certifications, project types, or soft skills, you can create a glossary of approved terms, so that everyone across your organization is speaking the same language.
  
  
• Searchable Skills Database: Flowcase’s powerful search functionality lets you quickly find employees based on specific skills, competencies, or experience. This ensures you always know who is best suited for a given task.
  
  
• Individual vs. Company-Wide Attributes: Flowcase provides the flexibility to manage both individual employee data and company-wide talent capabilities, ensuring a comprehensive view of your workforce.
  
  
• AI-Powered: Our system is enabled with AI to help make processes even simpler. For example, AI Data Import makes it simple to upload resumes or LinkedIn profiles, automatically turning them into searchable skills data. Additionally, AI Skill Suggestions automatically prompts users to add skills based on their project experiences—streamlining this manual process.
  
  

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Real-World Impact

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Flowcase makes it easy to act on the insights you gain. With accurate, up-to-date skill data, teams can quickly identify top talent for new proposals and projects. Alternatively, they can easily roll-up data to an organizational level, and spot opportunities for improvement, or ways to position the firm more strategically.

Conclusion

Skills mapping and competency mapping software are essential for any organization looking to optimize its workforce. With the right software, you can overcome the challenges of fragmented data, outdated skills, and inefficient processes. Whether you're tracking individual skills or managing company-wide competencies, Flowcase offers a comprehensive solution that streamlines the entire process and makes it easy to take action on the insights.

Ready to level up your approach to skills management? Book a personalized demo with Flowcase today.