February 1, 2024
A skills matrix is a visual tool that maps the required and current skills and competencies – and their levels – for a team, department or organisation.
A skills matrix is a visual tool that maps the required and current skills and competencies – and their levels – for a team, department or organisation.
A skills matrix is also called a competency matrix. Skills and competencies aren’t exactly the same thing, but let’s say that skills are a subset of competencies and a skills matrix is incomplete without the inclusion of competencies.
A skills matrix gives you a comprehensive overview of all the skills and competencies available in teams or the entire workforce. This helps decision makers to manage and deploy skills efficiently, spot skills gaps that could hurt productivity and business outcomes so that they can plug them. The insights from the skills matrix visualisation are used for daily decision making to optimise teams as well as for long-term planning. This is the ideal scenario. The quality of insights an organisation gets from a skills matrix, however, varies depending on how easy the tool is to access for all users, its user interface/user experience, whether it offers data visualisation and analysis, and more.
Traditionally, the skills matrix was largely used by the human resources department to get an overview of all the skills and competencies available in the organisation. But over the past few years, as work has become more complex, with a combination of employees, consultants and contractors working together on projects, decision makers have increasingly started using it to assess whether they have the skills and competencies needed to successfully complete the job at hand and to find, manage and deploy skills better. Skills matrices that are accessible to employees too, allow them to keep track of their skills development over time.
Skills matrices vary in complexity. A basic or traditional one can be a pen and paper grid-based list of employees along with their skills/competencies and proficiency or a colour-coded spreadsheet with a list of employee names alongside their skills and competencies and skill levels. But traditional skills matrices have limitations including the lack of integration with HR or other organisation-wide software. This limits usability, which may hurt the quality of skills and competency data collected and subsequently the insights derived from it.
More advanced skill matrices capture and display more data such as the employee’s willingness or interest in utilising a particular skill or competency, certifications and their validity (which in some cases is a legal requirement), their goals and skills growth over time, or even their availability (for project-based work).
Modern software-based skill matrices usually have all of the above and also allow users to input a master list of the essential skills for each role so that managers can easily conduct a skills gap analysis (skills required vs existing skills) to see whether the team/department/organisation has all the skills or competencies required to be successful. These are also dynamic – easily and regularly updated so that all users have the most recent data and the most accurate overview of the skills available.
A modern skills matrix is a valuable tool for the following reasons:
It is well established that visualised data is easier to comprehend and digest. Modern skills matrix software has made it possible for us to beautifully visualise the data so that it is easy to get insights from it – spot skills gaps and identify opportunities for training and development.
Example: A skills matrix visualisation on MuchSkills
Let’s look at two examples from skills management platform MuchSkills.
On MuchSkills, users can build a ‘master’ skills list for each role so employees are aware of the skills they are missing or need to develop further. In the example below, you can see ‘communication’ listed in the ‘role description’ for a Project Manager. In the visualisation, you can easily see that of 142 members across the organisation, only 16% have listed ‘communication’ as one of their skills (16 ranked ‘expert’ and 8 ranked ‘intermediate’). Not good!
Similarly, MuchSkills visually displays how well each employee fits within a specific role and its defined skills too. In the fictitious example below, Daniel Nilsson has only 4 of 13 skills needed for the role he is in. You can also view his skill levels and the skills missing for that particular role. This enables the employee to understand their skill status and what skills they need to build so that they become a better fit for that role.
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