LMS improvement

How Do You Approach Skills and Career Mapping?

We regularly hear from individuals and learning leaders who’ve been tasked with embedding skills frameworks and empowering people to plan their careers. It’s such a vast topic that knowing where to start can feel overwhelming. Here’s a practical roadmap to guide you through the process.

One of our core areas of expertise is building bespoke skills and career mapping journeys. We’re currently partnering with forward-thinking organisations like Tesco, Gatwick, and Lego to tackle this challenge. By approaching skills mapping from a creative first perspective, we’ve developed a simplified roadmap that breaks the process into four manageable phases:

Phase 1: Create an Easy-to-Access Toolkit

Build a visual guide that helps your people understand that your organisation actively supports internal mobility and career development.

Top tip: Use this opportunity to bust common career myths and misconceptions that might be holding people back.

Phase 2: Demonstrate Career Pathways

Most employees have limited visibility into what other departments do or how their existing skills might transfer to new roles. Creating clear, visual career pathways helps bridge this knowledge gap.

Tip: Make your career map engaging and on-brand. Tell compelling stories about real career journeys within your organisation—like this excellent example from our work with Gatwick.

Phase 3: Smart Skills Selection

This is where you introduce your skills framework. Start by enabling users to evaluate their current capabilities, then help them compare these against requirements for other roles. Present this comparison data in a clear, digestible format.

Key recommendations:

Keep your skills taxonomy simple—limit it to 10 core skills maximum
Use 4-5 proficiency levels for evaluation
Ensure skills and levels are easy to understand and consistently applied
Consider developing a customised self-evaluation tool

Phase 4: Create Pathways to Learning and Roles

The ultimate goal is enabling self-directed career progression backed by solid data. Integrate learning pathways from your Learning Management System (LMS) with job opportunities from your Applicant Tracking System (ATS).

Tip: Foster a culture where people can set their own career objectives and have the right tools to achieve them.

We know this framework sounds straightforward, and there’s certainly substantial work involved in execution. However, we’ve consistently found that by breaking the challenge into achievable phases and collaborating with the right stakeholders, organisations can progress from having no skills framework to implementing a robust skills and career mapping system within a year.

For a more detailed exploration of this approach, including case studies and implementation strategies, read our comprehensive post on career pathways