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Competency mapping gives everyone the same answer to a simple question: what does good look like in this role? We help growing organisations define their roles, the functional skills each one needs and the behaviours that lead to success, built with your managers so they actually use them.
84 role descriptions written where none existed · 95 functional skills defined across 17 functions · Top 75 leaders aligned on new values and behaviours
As businesses grow on experienced people and informal know-how, nobody stops to define what each role actually needs. Hiring and development run on instinct.
Generic competency libraries describe an imaginary company. Managers cannot see their own work in them, so they stop using them.
If competencies do not shape hiring, performance, promotion and development, they stay a document rather than a way of working.
A framework written by HR alone rarely survives contact with line managers. It has to be built with the people who will use it.
We build the foundations every other people decision depends on.
We map your organisation, agree a standard role template, and write clear role descriptions function by function, so every role has a defined purpose, scope and set of expectations.
We define the knowledge and skills each department needs, with proficiency levels that show what basic, competent and expert look like in your context.
We identify the behaviours that drive success in your organisation, and the ones that derail it, working with your people through focus groups rather than importing a list.
Where values or culture are changing, we translate them into leadership competencies that leaders can be hired, developed and promoted against. For wider culture change, see our organisation development consulting.
A framework only works once it shapes decisions. We connect it to hiring and capability assessment through our skills gap assessment and competency-based hiring work, and to bench strength through succession planning.
Gather role and workforce data, map the structure, and identify where roles overlap, are missing or need redefining.
Agree a standard template and write role descriptions with functional heads, function by function.
Draw out functional skills from each role, and identify success and derailing behaviours through focus groups, so the framework reflects how work is really done.
Set proficiency levels for each skill and descriptors for each behaviour by grade, and get sign-off from functional heads and the business head.
Train managers to use the framework in conversations with their teams, and connect it to hiring, development and succession.
The organisation has doubled, but roles are still defined by the people in them.
Hiring, onboarding and appraisals all start from scratch each time.
New ownership or strategy needs leadership competencies to match.
You cannot assess capability or plan succession without first defining what good looks like.
Capability centres and new business units need role and skill architecture from day one.
With no formal role descriptions across two manufacturing units, the business had no shared language for skills. We wrote every role, built a functional skills dictionary and a success behaviours dictionary by grade, and trained managers and employees to use them.
Result: 84 role descriptions, 95 functional skills across 17 functions, and a framework now used for hiring, with 98% of new hires retained.
Moving from family to private-equity ownership, the airport needed its new values to show up in how leaders were hired, assessed and promoted. We translated the values into leadership competencies and built them into hiring, performance, promotion and rewards.
Result: Top 75 leaders aligned on the new values and behaviours, with competency-driven people systems institutionalised.
Working with the top leadership, we mapped the workforce and wrote role descriptions, then defined skills and behaviours with the people who do the work. Gap assessment and succession for critical roles follow.
Progress so far: 21 role descriptions, more than 100 skills and competencies, and six success and two derailing behaviours defined.


Roles, functional skills and behaviours for an organisation or a business unit, typically over three to six months.
Competency mapping as the first phase, followed by gap assessment, hiring and succession, typically over six to twelve months.
Translating new values into leadership competencies, as part of a wider organisation development programme.
Every engagement is shaped around your organisation, and built with your managers and functional heads, not handed to them.
Tell us where role clarity is costing you most. We will help you see what a competency framework built for your organisation would look like, and how quickly it could be in use, for organisations across India and the UAE.
Competency mapping identifies the skills, knowledge and behaviours each role needs to succeed, and sets out what good looks like at each level.
Competency mapping is the work of identifying what each role needs. The competency framework is the result: the structured set of skills and behaviours, with levels, that the organisation then uses.
Functional competencies are the knowledge and skills a role needs, such as financial analysis or quality control. Behavioural competencies describe how people work, such as ownership or collaboration, and apply across roles.
No. We build the framework from your roles and your people, through role analysis and focus groups, so managers recognise their own work in it.
For an organisation of a few hundred people, roles, skills and behaviours typically take three to six months, depending on how many roles there are and how much already exists.
We train managers to use it in structured conversations with their teams, which also show where skills are missing. See our skills gap assessment work.
Yes, and it should be. We connect it to interview guides, performance discussions, promotion criteria and succession planning, so it shapes real decisions.
Yes. We work with organisations across India from Bengaluru and across the Gulf from Dubai, in person and virtually.
Planet Ganges is a prominent player in Business Transformation, delivering tailored interventions in Organisational Culture, Climate, and Leadership Capability.