INTHEBLACK July 2025 - Magazine - Page 54
WORK SMART
Skills mapping:
Plotting the path
Skills mapping is a valuable tool for
organisations to future-proof their
workforces. Here’s how to start.
Words Nicola Heath
Skills management remains one of the most
urgent concerns for leaders worldwide.
“We’ve not only got skill shortages, we also
have a rapidly changing skills landscape, which is
driven by the acceleration of artificial intelligence
(AI) and digital,” says Cynthia Cottrell, workforce
solutions leader at Mercer Pacific.
These pressures are changing how
organisations structure their operating systems,
giving rise to the skills-powered organisation,
in which skills — rather than jobs — become
the organising principle of work.
In a skills-powered organisation, work is
broken down into tasks, projects and outcomes,
and mapped to the necessary skills. It is
a model that acknowledges workers as people
and prioritises learning and development,
placing value on developing individual strengths
and skills. It also requires a radically different
approach to talent management.
54 INTHEBLACK July 2025
And it’s catching on. According to Mercer’s
2024–2025 Skills Snapshot Survey Report,
70 per cent of respondents have identified
the most critical skills for their departments.
Almost half have begun work on developing
a skills library.
However, many organisations are still yet
to fully leverage their workforce’s skills.
According to a 2022 Deloitte survey, only
14 per cent of business executives strongly
agree their organisation is using their
workforce’s skills to their fullest potential.
One solution is skills mapping, a process
that identifies and documents employees’
skills and maps these capabilities to the
organisation’s needs.
A TWO-PRONGED PROCESS
An essential feature of skills-powered
organisations, skills mapping is a two-pronged
process, Cottrell says.
“We’ve got to first know what’s in our
organisation — so what skills we have — and
map those skills to employees. Then we’ve got
to make sure that we have a clear mapping
of skills to the key roles we have in an
organisation, so we can understand what
