Skills & Competencies

What this achieves

This section is where you describe the capabilities your company needs and record who actually has them. Once both sides exist, Humavera can compare them and show you where you are short.

Skills and competencies are not the same thing

The two words are often used interchangeably, and Humavera keeps them apart deliberately.

Option	Description
Skill	Something specific a person can do, usually technical or practical. Held in a tenant skill taxonomy with categories, versioning, search, and deprecation.
Competency	A broader behavioural or professional capability, defined with proficiency scales, versioned, and published or archived.

Example: at HC Corp, a named programming language is a skill James Whitfield holds. “Leads technical decisions” is a competency expected of Olivia Bennett’s role.

Both link to job profiles, which is how a role states what it requires rather than leaving it to the person writing the job advert.

Building the library

You do not have to start from an empty list. Humavera maintains a platform-curated global library spanning industries and regions that you can import from, then adapt.

The library is versioned and skills can be deprecated rather than deleted. That matters because a skill someone was assessed against three years ago must still make sense when you read the assessment today.

Recording who has what

Employees build a skill portfolio by rating themselves on a five-point proficiency scale, and managers rate their reports. Two mechanisms add weight to those ratings.

Option	Description
Evidence and verification	An employee submits evidence for a skill, and a manager verifies or rejects it with a reason.
Endorsements	Peers endorse each other’s skills, and can request or withdraw an endorsement.
Formal assessments	Proficiency assessments that are assigned, completed, and recorded against the person.

Example: James Whitfield rates himself on a skill and submits evidence. Olivia Bennett verifies it, which turns a self-claim into something the company can rely on for staffing.

Skills also age. Humavera flags them as fresh, ageing, or stale based on when they were last validated, so a capability recorded years ago is not treated as current.

Analytics: the reason to do any of this

A skill inventory is only worth maintaining if it answers questions. Once roles state their requirements and people record their capability, Humavera compares the two.

Option	Description
Gap analysis	Where capability falls short of what is required, at company, department, team, or individual level.
Heatmaps	Where capability is concentrated or missing across teams and departments.
Skill inventory	What the company holds in total.
Demand versus supply	Capability you need set against capability you have.

Example: gap analysis across Engineering at HC Corp shows whether a shortfall is one person needing a course or a team-wide gap that hiring should close.

What happens next

Gaps are a starting point, not a conclusion. A gap in one person usually becomes a course or a development plan; a gap across a team usually becomes hiring or a change to a job profile. The same data drives readiness scoring against target roles, career pathing, and matching people to internal opportunities — all of which depend on skills being recorded consistently.

Organization-wide skill analytics are an administrative view. Managers see their own team’s capability rather than company-wide figures.