Skills & Competency Review

What is it?

A skills and competency review is a structured assessment that maps an employee’s current proficiency against the competencies required for their role. It identifies strengths, gaps, and development priorities so the organisation can invest in targeted training rather than generic programmes.

Unlike annual performance reviews that focus on goals and outputs, a skills review focuses on knowledge and capability. It asks: does this person have the technical, functional, and behavioural competencies their role requires? Where are the gaps, and what is the plan to close them? Without a standardised template, skills assessments vary by manager, making it impossible to compare across teams, identify systemic gaps, or plan workforce development at scale.

Who should use this template?

This template is for teams responsible for workforce capability and development:

• HR Business Partners: run skills assessments across departments and identify organisation-wide competency gaps

• Line Managers: assess direct reports against role-specific competencies and agree on development actions

• Learning and Development Teams: use aggregated skills data to design training programmes that address real gaps

• Knowledge Managers: connect skills gaps to knowledge assets so employees access the right learning content

How to create this template in Elium

1. Open the Template Builder: Go to your profile menu and select the Template Builder tab, or click “+ Create” and choose “Create a new template”.

2. Set the scope: Choose an icon, enable the template, and decide whether it applies platform-wide or to specific spaces (e.g. HR or individual departments).

3. Add structured fields: Click “Field” to add metadata: text fields for employee name and role, a tag field for department, a user field for reporting manager, a tag field for review period, and a tag field for status (pre-populate with “Scheduled”, “In Progress”, “Completed”). Mark employee name and review period as mandatory.

4. Build the review structure: Use the “+” button to add content blocks: a table block for the competency framework (columns: competency, category, target level, current level, gap), a text block for gap analysis, a table block for the development plan (columns: competency, action, method, owner, deadline), and text blocks for manager and employee comments.

5. Preview and save: Review the template layout, then save. Managers can now select it when running skills reviews, and you can apply it to existing content in bulk.

How AI helps

Capture faster. Tell Elium’s AI the role title and department. It suggests a competency framework based on similar roles already documented in your knowledge base, so the manager adjusts rather than building from scratch.

Retrieve smarter. An L&D manager asks Elium’s AI: “Which technical competencies have the widest gaps across our engineering teams?” The AI aggregates data from completed reviews and surfaces the most common shortfalls, so training investment targets the areas with the greatest need.

Why teams use Elium for this

Skills data is only useful when it is current, consistent, and connected to action. When reviews live in spreadsheets emailed between managers and HR, the data fragments and goes stale. Elium keeps skills knowledge centralised: structured templates ensure every review follows the same framework, search connects skills gaps to relevant training content, and version history tracks how competencies develop over time.

Bouygues Construction, with 53,500 employees across 80 countries, uses Elium to centralise people and operational knowledge. Skills documentation, training materials, and best practices are accessible across the organisation, supporting workforce development at scale.