Monitoring, the soft skill that tracks your own progress to adjust in time

Not to be confused with IT monitoring: here, monitoring refers to the human competency of tracking your own performance indicators, measurable in professional situations.

Employee tracking their objectives progress on a dashboard
Monitoring

What is monitoring at work?

Monitoring (not to be confused with IT monitoring) is the ability to track one's own progress, to analyse gaps and to adjust one's strategies to improve the effectiveness and quality of one's work.

It is neither discipline, applying a frame, nor reporting, documenting to account for: monitoring serves to adjust, in the course of action to correct in time, and afterwards to draw the lessons of a cycle and do better on the next. Concretely, it is the person who, mid-way through a project, changes method when their own is not producing the expected results, and who, once the project is done, extracts what is worth reproducing.

Like all Core Skills, it is not a personality trait but a trainable cognitive ability, which rests on identifiable mechanisms and expresses itself in observable professional behaviours.

Where this skill plays out concretely:

What kinds of tasks: project management, tracking annual objectives, managing a portfolio of files, working autonomously without intermediate validation.

In which contexts: it becomes decisive everywhere feedback is not immediate, remote work, management by objectives, long assignments, that is where a gap is only seen at the deadline, when it is too late.

At what level of mastery: for example, defining one's own markers, detecting the gap early and adjusting without being asked.

Monitoring belongs to the Operational Effectiveness family of our framework of 18 soft skills (Rising Up Core Skills).

Why develop monitoring?

In an environment where tracking one's own work becomes an accountability criterion, human monitoring is a measurable driver of performance:

Pour qui?

Pour qui et dans quels contextes ?

This soft skill is embedded in our development paths and certifying assessments at Rising Up.

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Company

In organisations that hold their talents accountable to objectives, motivation alone does not guarantee that the employee will define their own indicators and adjust in time. The Rising Up Soft Skills Scan objectively measures monitoring in your talents to identify profiles capable of tracking their progress and adjusting in time. The result: drifts detected in time, better annual objectives held and stronger accountability culture. This competency is particularly important for managers, PMOs, project managers, sales professionals and consultants.

Recruiter

CV and interview no longer suffice to distinguish real human monitoring competency from a displayed rigor posture. The Rising Up Soft Skills Scan measures monitoring before the interview through several contextualised evaluation methods, and gives you actionable behavioural data. You gain an objective behavioural signal to limit the risk of a bad hire on roles requiring autonomous tracking of one's work. This competency is particularly important for managers, PMOs, project managers, sales professionals and consultants.

Higher education institution

Employers in management, sales and project management fields expect graduates to be able to self-monitor their work, an ability rarely measured objectively in traditional curricula. The Rising Up Soft Skills Scan measures this competency, develops your students through the Soft Skills Enrichment programme, then certifies their level at the end of the curriculum. You strengthen graduate employability. This competency is particularly important for managers, PMOs, project managers, sales professionals and consultants.

Monitoring

Comment la mesurer et la développer ?

Through the Rising Up Soft Skills Scan, monitoring is measured scientifically on a 0-100 scale, using different evaluation methods, from situational exercises to contextualized questionnaires, calibrated by our scientific team, led by Dr Nawal Abboub (PhD in cognitive science, lecturer at ENS-PSL, co-founder of Rising Up), in collaboration with researchers from the CNRS, ENS-PSL and Université Paris Cité.

Every report includes:

  • a detailed score and its positioning against the requirements of the role
  • a contextualized behavioural analysis for each professional situation
  • personalized recommendations to progress over time

Rising Up is recognised as Deeptech by the European Commission since 2023.

Then, the modules of the Soft Skills Enrichment programme allow you to improve this skill through self-tracking and self-analysis challenges, realistic simulations and reflections guided by our proprietary CoreSkills AI.

Develop monitoring
Measuring monitoring with Rising Up helps us guide our students toward autonomous roles where their ability to track and analyse their own work will make the difference from the first job, especially in remote work and project management.
Careers Director, management school, 1,100 students (anonymised Rising Up case)
FAQ

Understanding and developing monitoring

What is the difference between human monitoring and IT monitoring?

IT monitoring refers to using software tools to watch a technical system (servers, networks, applications). Monitoring as a soft skill is different: it is the human competency to define your own indicators, track them regularly and adjust your action accordingly.

Rising Up measures the human competency of tracking and analysing one's own work, not the use of IT tools. A professional can master Datadog without having any human monitoring competency, and vice versa.

Can monitoring be developed as an adult?

Yes. Cognitive science and metacognition research show that human monitoring is a trainable competency at any age through practising personal indicator definition, regular tracking and feedback-based adjustment.

Our Soft Skills Enrichment programme offers exercises to develop monitoring, with AI-based progress tracking through CoreSkills AI.

Can this competency be measured objectively?

Calling yourself rigorous in tracking is easy; being truly so over several weeks is harder. What matters is measuring behaviour in context, not an abstract declaration.

The Rising Up Soft Skills Scan evaluates monitoring by combining situational exercises and contextualized questionnaires, where the candidate must define relevant indicators, interpret their variations and adjust action. It is the in-context response that is scored, never an abstract self-assessment.

Why is this competency valued in 2026?

Behavioural skills predict professional success, contribute to it causally, and can be developed (research by James Heckman, Nobel laureate in economics). With the spread of remote work, objective-based work and operational autonomy, human monitoring is the primary driver of individual reliability at distance.

Without monitoring, an autonomous employee can discover a gap too late, generate surprises at end-of-quarter and lose management trust. It is a central hiring criterion on autonomous and hybrid roles.

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