Why legacy organisations need a modern skills matrix

Many long-established organisations recognise the need to modernise. They invest heavily in automation, digital tools, and new technologies to optimise operations and remain competitive. Yet despite these efforts, progress often stalls in a familiar way.

This is rarely a failure of ambition, intelligence, or willingness to change. Leaders understand that new technologies and new ways of working demand new skills. The problem emerges when they try to act on that understanding. When asked what skills the organisation actually has, where critical gaps exist, who needs support, or how to prioritise development – essential answers for leading change and making informed decisions – they are unable to answer with confidence.

The reason is structural. Data about skills is scattered across spreadsheets, job descriptions, CVs, and managers’ heads, rather than captured in one shared, reliable system the organisation can use to plan and act. As a result, skills exist, but they are not visible, comparable, or actionable.

This reflects a broader reality facing many legacy organisations. Their systems and structures were never designed to keep skills current, visible, and usable as work evolves. In an environment where capability must change continuously, this lack of skills visibility becomes a bottleneck for transformation. To compete today, organisations need a more modern approach to skills management, and for many, a modern skills matrix is the most practical place to start.

What is a skills matrix: Traditional vs modern

At its simplest, a skills matrix is a way of mapping who can do what. Traditionally, this has taken the form of a spreadsheet: rows list people, columns list skills, and cells are filled with levels, tick marks, or notes intended to capture employees’ skills and capabilities at a moment in time.

This approach works only up to a point. For small teams and relatively stable roles, spreadsheets can provide a quick overview. But as organisations grow, roles evolve, and skills change, they become hard to maintain, difficult to validate, and increasingly disconnected from reality. Over time, they turn into outdated data that cannot be trusted to support business and people decisions. 

Additionally, while spreadsheet-based skills matrices may show who can do what on paper, they offer little insight into how capability is developing, where skills are at risk across teams or departments, or how well current skills align with future needs.

A modern skills matrix addresses these limitations. Rather than acting as a static snapshot, it provides leaders with a continuously updated view of skills across the organisation. This provides clear visibility into strengths, gaps, and critical dependencies, such as over-reliance on specific skills or individuals. As a result, leaders can align employees and teams more effectively with roles, projects, and development priorities. Decisions are no longer based on memory or intuition, but grounded in consistent, structured skills data.

A modern skills matrix also scales. It can be designed to document technical skills, soft skills, leadership capabilities, or any combination that matters to the organisation. It can represent individuals, teams, departments, or the entire business, and be tailored for specific roles, projects, or strategic goals. In doing so, it turns fragmented skills information into patterns that can be understood and used with confidence.

In MuchSkills, this is reflected in how the skills matrix captures not only skills, but also proficiency levels, certifications, and interests. This is one example of how a modern skills matrix moves beyond static lists, reflecting how people grow, how roles evolve, and how work actually gets done over time. It gives leaders a more granular and reliable understanding of organisational capability.

Why legacy organisations struggle with skills visibility

Most legacy organisations are not resistant to change by nature. They are constrained by how they have been built. Here are some reasons why they struggle to get a handle on skills visibility:

Cultural and structural constraints

All organisations have cultures that shape their beliefs, values, and experiences. Strong cultures provide stability and continuity, but they can also make adaptation of new ways to do things harder. In organisations with entrenched hierarchies and top-down decision-making, it becomes difficult to challenge established roles, behaviours, and strategies. In some cases, earlier transformation efforts that delivered little lasting value increase scepticism toward new ideas such as modern skills-led initiatives. Fear of disruption is also common, often driven by the belief that any change will interfere with day-to-day operations and hurt productivity.

Operational complexity

Many legacy organisations struggle with uneven digital literacy across the organisation, which makes meaningful change harder to sustain. Even in the digital era, some companies persist with manual HR systems and outdated spreadsheets for skills mapping. These tools rely on clumsy interfaces, static job descriptions, and siloed data, and fail to capture fast-evolving skills, identify emerging gaps, or surface hidden talent across the organisation.

Traditional HR practices often reinforce this problem by continuing to assess performance and potential without a reliable view of actual skills. It is therefore unsurprising that only 2% of chief HR officers interviewed by Gallup defended the effectiveness of traditional performance management systems, while 61% of managers and 72% of employees surveyed in Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends report expressed distrust in their companies’ performance management processes.

Leadership alignment and employee confidence

Successful change management requires buy-in from both management and the workforce. Yet, in many organisations (not just legacy institutions), leaders and employees are sceptical about change, whether it is adopting a new technology or shifting strategies to compete with new business rivals. Their resistance comes from numerous factors – fear of the unknown, of losing control, of being exposed, negative experiences, or even lack of vision. Studies show the average employee believes change will result in more work for them or cost them their jobs, even if this isn’t true. This is why clear communication from leaders is vital for getting employee support for change initiatives. Unfortunately, only 32% of leaders worldwide manage to convince employees to adopt change, says Gartner.

Why a modern skills matrix matters

From Disney to Netflix, many established organisations have shown that embracing change pays off. Often, progress starts with small but meaningful shifts. Here are the advantages of switching to a modern skills matrix:

• Centralised skills visibility: Spreadsheets might still work for small companies, but they become ineffective, and even risky, for large and dynamic organisations with high-volume datasets. A modern skills matrix can capture an organisation’s full range of skills and competencies with far greater precision. It shows, at a glance, who has which skills, where training or reskilling is needed, which teams are weak or strong, and where hidden talents or knowledge gaps exist. With centralised dashboards and real-time updates, organisations gain skills visibility they can actually rely on.
• Data-driven decision-making: Modern skills matrices provide data-backed insights that inform decision-making, allowing organisations to base decisions on evidence rather than intuition or guesswork. This supports more grounded decisions across hiring, promotion, training, and project allocation. According to PwC, companies using data and analytics are three times more likely to see improvements in strategic decision-making than those that do not.
• Employee engagement: The value of a modern skills matrix lies not only in providing real-time skills visibility for stronger business outcomes, but in enabling meaningful and continuous employee development. It enables organisations to design targeted, personalised training and development initiatives that help employees grow and progress within the organisation. This is a huge draw given that today’s workforce prioritises career progression as much as success and money. By recognising strengths and abilities over qualifications or connections, and by promoting transparency and impartiality, modern skills matrices open up new growth paths even in conservative environments. This significantly strengthens employee engagement, trust, productivity, and retention.

How to implement a modern skills matrix in legacy organisations

Adopting a modern skills matrix does not require a wholesale transformation. A measured, structured approach works best.

Step 1: Start with the ‘Why’

Communicate the purpose and benefits of the skills matrix clearly to employees. Without their support, it will not work. In legacy organisations where there is often scepticism toward new ways of working, it is especially important to explain how the skills matrix benefits not only the organisation, but also supports individual development. Getting employees on board early is critical to earning their cooperation and active participation in the skills and competency mapping process.

Step 2: Run a pilot

Start small, with a single team or project. Define clear objectives for the pilot, such as mapping skills against roles or identifying where training and reskilling are needed, and agree upfront on the metrics used to measure outcomes. During the pilot, hold regular check-ins with participants and stakeholders to provide support and gather feedback. Once complete, review the results, assess what worked and what needs improvement, and incorporate lessons learned before expanding the skills matrix across the organisation.

Step 3: Design for participation

The problem with many legacy systems is that they are designed primarily for HR administration and reporting, and are rarely used by anyone else. Modern skills matrices, by contrast, enable active participation from other stakeholders, particularly managers and employees. When implementing a skills matrix in legacy organisations, leaders can increase participation by deliberately designing for employee self-assessment, manager validation, and ongoing feedback.

Self-assessment motivates employees to actively contribute to the skills matrix and take greater ownership of their growth and development. Manager validation adds accountability and consistency, helping ensure the data remains credible and useful over time. Regular feedback and open communication ensure the skills matrix does not become a static assessment tool, but a driver of continuous learning and development.

Step 4: Align HR and managers

For the skills matrix to drive strategic workforce development, HR must work closely with managers and department heads. Only with this alignment can the skills matrix accurately capture the skills and competencies required to achieve specific business goals. It helps eliminate departmental siloes, ensures skills data is used intelligently, and strengthens decision-making across hiring, training, upskilling and reskilling, employee development, and succession planning.

Step 5: Measure, celebrate, and scale:

For legacy organisations, acknowledging and celebrating early wins, such as a successful project completion or an upskilling programme hitting its mark can ease adoption and support wider rollout of the skills matrix. At the same time, it is important to continuously monitor and review the skills matrix, make improvements, and introduce customisations as needed as the organisation scales.

For tips on how to create your own modern skills matrix, read our article ‘What is a skills matrix and how do you create one?’.

How MuchSkills makes it easier

For legacy organisations looking to modernise skills management, MuchSkills provides a practical way to build and maintain a modern skills matrix without forcing disruptive organisational change. Rather than treating skills as static HR data, MuchSkills helps organisations make skills visible, structured, and usable across teams and roles.

Here is how the MuchSkills skills matrix supports that shift:

For legacy organisations looking to modernise skills management, MuchSkills provides a practical way to build and maintain a modern skills matrix without forcing disruptive organisational change. Rather than treating skills as static HR data, MuchSkills helps organisations make skills visible, structured, and usable across teams and roles.

Here is how the MuchSkills skills matrix supports that shift:

• A shared, live view of organisational skills: MuchSkills provides a central place to map skills, competencies, certifications, and experience across individuals, teams, and the organisation. Skills data is continuously updated through employee input and manager validation, replacing fragmented spreadsheets and outdated snapshots with a shared view leaders and teams can trust.

• Clear structure through taxonomies and presets: Skills in MuchSkills are organised using clear taxonomies, consistent definitions, and reusable presets for roles, teams, departments, and capability areas. This structure ensures skills are measured and discussed in the same way across the organisation, while making it easier for employees to assess themselves against relevant skill sets rather than starting from scratch.

• Clear visualisation and fast exploration of skills data: Skills data is presented in a visual format that makes large datasets easier to understand and work with. Search and filtering tools allow managers, HR, and leaders to quickly explore where skills sit, how they are distributed, and where strengths or gaps are emerging across teams and functions.

• Skills gap analysis and workforce insight: Built-in skills gap analysis and workforce reports make it possible to see where capability is missing, over-reliant on a few individuals, or misaligned with future needs. This supports better decisions around training, upskilling, reskilling, and longer-term workforce planning, particularly in organisations undergoing change. 

• AI-supported insight, not automated decisions: AI in MuchSkills is used to support analysis and understanding, such as highlighting skill gaps, informing role-fit discussions, and guiding development planning. It helps organisations interpret complex skills data while keeping judgement and accountability with leaders, managers, and employees.

Together, these capabilities allow organisations to move beyond static skills lists and treat skills as living organisational data that can be used across development, planning, and day-to-day decision-making.

For further guidance, see our article Skills matrix best practices: 5 mistakes to avoid for effective workforce planning.

Conclusion

Change is no longer a future challenge for legacy organisations. New ways of working, shifting skill requirements, and evolving competitive pressures are already shaping day-to-day decisions. Evidence consistently shows that organisations able to adopt and sustain change outperform those that cannot. According to Gartner, companies with above-average change adoption see year-over-year revenue growth rates twice as high as those that fall behind.

Building a modern skills matrix with MuchSkills is not about transformation for its own sake. It is a practical way to make skills visible, trusted, and actionable, creating a stronger foundation for workforce agility and strategic planning. For organisations struggling with change fatigue or fragmented skills data, this shift can mark the difference between reacting to disruption and being prepared for it.