Most organisations aren’t short of job data. The challenge is that it’s everywhere, but this is fast becoming a key challenge for organisations looking at their skills strategy.
Job descriptions live in shared folders. Performance expectations are buried in HCM systems. Project tools, collaboration platforms and learning records all hold fragments of what people actually do. Individually, each source tells part of the story. Together, they could form the backbone of a powerful skills framework, if only they could be brought into one place.
This is where many a skills strategy and plan loses momentum. Not because the ambition isn’t clear, but because the foundations are scattered.
Why Consolidation Comes First
We’ve seen this often with organisations on their skills strategy journey: conversations start with energy and intent, but momentum slows when it’s time to translate ambition into action. Without a consolidated view of job content, it’s incredibly hard to define skills, track them reliably or use them consistently across different talent processes.
Consolidation isn’t about starting from scratch. It’s about locating the knowledge that already exists — often hidden in plain sight — and turning it into something structured, consistent and usable.
You can’t build a credible skills strategy on fragmented information. Trying to do so leads to mismatches, duplication and a lack of trust in the output.
What That Data Looks Like
It starts with the obvious sources: job descriptions, person specs and role profiles. These documents form the basis of most hiring and performance decisions, even if they’re outdated or inconsistently written.
Then there are the less structured sources, performance reviews, feedback forms, training records and project briefs. Tools like Jira or Trello often hold the clearest picture of what work actually looks like in practice. In some organisations, legacy competency models or capability libraries offer a helpful starting point, even if they need updating.
Each source contains useful signals. The real value comes from bringing them together, making sense of them and identifying what’s still relevant.
The Risks of Skipping This Step
Many organisations feel pressure to move quickly, especially if they’ve committed to a skills strategy at board level. That urgency can make it tempting to skip ahead to skills mapping or tech implementation.
But when the underlying data isn’t solid, the framework built on top of it won’t hold. Skills will be too broad, too vague or disconnected from actual job content. Different teams will interpret the same roles differently and any analytics produced will struggle to drive meaningful action.
We’ve spoken with organisations who’ve had to pause or restart their programmes after realising that the data being used to surface skills didn’t reflect reality. It’s a costly setback that’s avoidable with consolidation.
What Good Consolidation Looks Like
It doesn’t have to mean a massive data clean-up project. In our experience, the best outcomes come from a focused, job-family-first approach:
- Prioritise the parts of the business most ready or in most need
- Collect job data from across systems, teams and geographies
- Standardise naming conventions and role structures
- Remove duplicates, align inconsistent formats and identify gaps
- Use tech to analyse content and spot skills automatically
- You don’t need to perfect everything before you move forward. The goal is to establish a reliable core of job content you can build from — one that reflects how work gets done and gives you a shared reference point.
Beyond the Skills-based Strategy
What’s often overlooked is how useful this work becomes outside of the skills strategy conversation. Once job content is consolidated and structured, it supports performance reviews, career frameworks, internal mobility and pay equity, all from the same foundation.
We’ve seen organisations uncover outdated job families, reduce duplication in their job catalogue and spot where responsibilities have drifted over time. Consolidation brings clarity, not just to HR, but to the whole organisation.
It’s also a key enabler for fairness and compliance. With regulations like the EU Pay Transparency Directive, organisations need a consistent, auditable way to define and compare roles. Clean job data makes that possible, avoiding risk while strengthening trust.
About RoleMapper
At RoleMapper, we’ve helped organisations consolidate thousands of job descriptions, role profiles and other job data. We’ve seen what happens when you surface everything into one place and structure it well. It becomes a foundation that powers not just skills, but hiring, pay, performance and progression.
Our platform helps make this step manageable by automating content ingestion, highlighting duplication and surfacing skills at speed. It supports both quick wins and long-term change.
If you’re struggling to move your skills strategy forward, start by looking at your job content. Consolidation might not be the most exciting part of the process, but it’s the one that can make the most significant difference.
