Imagine this... You have have a customer support desk with 1 French speaker. Next time you are looking for a member into your international sales team, add French proficiency to the list, so in case that one French speaker in the customer support desk is on sick leave you will have a substitute.

• Better understanding of company-wide skill capabilities
• Deeper overview of individual employee strengths
• A path to organized succession planning
• Improvement to training planning
• Help in scheduling and team setup
• Cost saving by utilizing more internal resources

Forward profiles of various positions to area or department managers or have a quick meeting with them. The goal is to make sure that these skills match the professional competencies and expectations of respective managers. Alter and update the maps as needed.

Step 4: Result evaluation

This is the most daunting part, if you don’t have a proper tool, I’m afraid. Upsteem.com has an excelling way of running these reviews, but with a small number of employees even Excel can suffice. Just make sure that review levels are simple, logical and allow you to pivot and visualise results. There are several key nuances to evaluation of competency maps.

Firstly, this is a great base for using and improving skills and competency of individual employees. By looking at discrepancies of self-evaluation and that by manager, discoveries can be made and used for individual follow-up.

Secondly, level of particular competency or subset in each area or department, can tell you a lot about possible risks.

For example, you have a team of 5 crane operators, 2 senior and 3 - junior, who operate 2 Liebherr cranes. Let’s assume that on the previously mentioned 0-4 scale, they scored 2,8 average with no irrelevant marks. Besides the obvious unacceptably low number, this immediately tells you that if one of senior operators were to leave or get sick, at least 1 crane would be un-manned for a while.

Thirdly, use this data to update your company’s competency matrix and present results in a meaningful way to department heads and management to get their feedback (and give them a dose of reality). A regular SWAT or similar 2D approach can be very visual.

Lastly and most importantly, you can start planning training's and recruitment. By looking at particular skills in entire organization, you are much better fit to plan effective training courses for larger groups of people. Updating recruitment strategy to include some extra options to strengthen backup capabilities of skills available thought out organization is also a good idea.

Step 5: Pivot

First competency reviews are often trial and error affairs, as there are going to be many extremes and false-positives (and negatives). You should tweak competency models of each position and review questions to make sure that they reflect actual needs and also provide better data for your analysis.

Step 6: Iterate

While you don’t have to run full competency review cycle for entire organization each quarter, you might want do smaller evaluation quarterly to update the actual data on areas, where training's took place. Also, don’t forget to take into account employees moving within company, coming and leaving.

As you see, with proper preparation it isn’t that difficult to build up and maintain a proper competency matrix. I do however strongly advise you to use a dedicated solution for this, as keeping 100+ employees spread over 10+ profiles updated manually in Excel can become a chore. Here are a few more tips:

• Get a lot of feedback on work tasks and required competencies
  
• Consider soft skills and competencies as well
  
• Communicate reasons for this process prior to doing reviews
  
• Ask people to allocate 30-60 minutes for filling the survey
  
• Give feedback to organization and individuals after survey
  
• Use results for preparing appraisals and setting goals
  
• Consider giving managers an option to evaluate “groups” of competencies at once