How to Map Capabilities & Proficiency Levels to Learning Content and Cohorts (in Acorn PLMS)
Three steps to make your learning content more impactful, relevant, and findable.
Mapping content to capabilities and proficiency levels is so hot right now. So hot in an “it’s the only way to make learning matter and show tangible business impact of L&D” way.
In this guide, we lay out how you can easily map your business capabilities to learning content in Acorn PLMS, including some hot tips on getting the most out of your people data.
What is capability mapping?
Capability mapping is the process of matching capabilities with learning content or job roles.
There are plenty of reasons to do it. You can:
- Effectively guarantee employees are learning exactly what they need to do their jobs
- Show the impact of learning initiatives on business by way of capabilities
- Optimize both in-house and external learning content for maximum impact
- More efficiently band or level job roles in your organization
- Track the effectiveness of learning content based on individual or cohort progress.
Mapping capabilities to content is more important than ever
The wrong technology. Low buy-in. Irrelevant content. A dozen disparate HR and learning systems. There are a bunch of reasons your learning and performance initiatives are not strategically hitting, and they’re all why we built our Capabilities platform.
Let’s break them down.
Number one: You don’t have the right tech. This links to having many, separate systems; each one has a different remit, but aside from some integrations to push and pull data, they’re not really speaking the same language. Your LMS is about content and completions, and your HRIS is storing people data. We’ll hedge a bet that if you do have a capability framework of some kind, it’s either in a spreadsheet or PDF (both being mostly unusable). Where are you tracking performance reviews? How are you tracking them—what are you basing assessments on?
Number two: You don’t have exec buy-in for L&D to begin with. We’ve been part of a lot of great but kind of heart-breaking conversations about the challenge of moving away from a content creation L&D model to one of value creation. McKinsey says it best: most training happens when rapid change is not needed. L&D is a status quo item, and therefore can’t shift gears when change is required (talent shortages, technological disruptions, etc.).
The framing has to be about making L&D the whole damn gear stick, so that the “status quo” activities are always about moving the organization forward, not maintaining a steady state.
Three: Irrelevant content. Many traditional LMS vendors will tell you that generative AI is the big-ticket item. But this is just mass consumerism spilling over into L&D. You don’t need more. You need a way to make content easily findable and relevant for individual learners.
Four: The L&D and HR tech stack is bloated. The issue with that is it creates more data than is necessary in different places; learning history in an LMS, performance history in a spreadsheet somewhere, career history in someone’s resume in an HRIS, feedback is collected in a survey tool, and so forth. We know that most organizations have two or more learning management systems (LMSs), for Pete’s sake.
Weird way to go about things when the main issue HR are often trying to solve is finding and analyzing useful people data as quickly as possible with as few errors as possible.
The issues you’re currently facing are the reason you need to find another way to do things. They’re also why finding a platform with the ability to map content to capabilities is the only way to actually make learning and development impactful.
How to map capabilities to learning content
What you need for this process:
- Capabilities module turned on
- A connected LMS, whether Acorn or otherwise
- A capability framework, either your own or pulled from our Capability Library
- Internal and external learning content in your catalog.
Keep in mind, the following can only be done by system administrators.
1. Match capabilities to content
Find your organization’s capability library and click ‘Map Capabilities to Content’. From there, select the capability, its corresponding proficiency level, and the content to assign them to.
You can choose any of the following options for content:
- Courses
- Live Learnings
- Videos
- Resources
- Partnered content.
Repeat as required for all the capabilities you’re mapping.
Hot tip when picking content: think about what’s going to be the best format to develop that capability.
- Workshops for hands-on leadership development for new leaders
- Job aid resources for on-the-job support, such as SEO basics for content creators
- Even webinars and conferences (aka partnered content and live learnings) for professional development hours
If you have the data, check past completion rates and qualitative feedback to see if content has had a measurable impact for learners or not.
2. Assign capabilities to roles & cohorts
When you’ve mapped content to capabilities, the next step is ensuring the right people see it. The purpose of cohorts in regular LMSs is to enroll learners in a single course at scale. We apply a similar thinking for that in Capabilities, but for job roles.
In large organizations, you’ll likely have a number of roles with the same core capabilities. Think: sales account executives, customer support managers, project managers, and so forth. Grouping those roles into cohorts makes it faster and more efficient to map capabilities to every role in your workforce, as well as clearly view how capabilities are distributed in your organization.
Select ‘Map Capabilities to Cohorts’ and either create a new cohort or search for an existing one. Open the cohort, add the number of capabilities you’d like, and you’re done step 2.
The sweet spot for capabilities per job role is about five. You can choose capabilities from different capability sets for roles that require skills from different areas.
For example, a project manager may need the capabilities of:
- Negotiation & persuasion (from the leadership set)
- Budgeting & cost control (a finance capability)
- Workflow optimization (operations).
3. Assess progress
When all is mapped, time for the fun part: reporting.
Within the Capabilities realm, you could choose from any of the following. (Note: There are more reports in the system, too!)
- Capability Report to see the assigned and interest capabilities of all learners. You could see trends in cohorts picking certain interest capabilities, for example, and move those into the core set.
- Development Plan Report to track each learner and their capability development plan, including previously completed plans. Helps admins personalize learning for individuals.
- Capability Assessment History Report to plot the trend of assessment results over time. Helpful for tracking the effectiveness of learning content for specific capabilities.
- Capability Assessment Gap Analysis Report to view the gaps and strengths across your organization based on all learners’ capability assessments. You could use this to see the gaps that persist in training, or find learners who need a little something more in their development plans.
But if you’re looking to zoom in on the learning lens, you could also go for any of the following reports.
- Content Completion to see the total completions for any assigned content. You can compare completions for different forms of content, e.g., do project managers engage more with webinars or job aids?
- Compliance shows the compliance status for a group of learners, say, for a cohort of engineers who have mandatory PD hours.
- Course Progress could show you if a cohort of new leaders if progressing at the expected pace, or if certain topics are causing drop-offs.
Final thoughts
Three small steps for man admins, one giant leap for organizations. Once you’ve matched your capabilities to content, you can start assessing your people. Keep an eye out for that guide soon.
You can find more technical how- to resources, explainers, and definitions in our Help Center.