Optimize workforce planning, enhance team performance and identify skill gaps with a skills matrix.
Whether you’re facing financial pressures or a tight labor market, you want to make sure your employees are set up to do great work. It’s what makes your business successful. To do that, you need to make sure you have people in the right roles today and understand where you’ll need to upskill, reskill, redeploy and recruit for tomorrow.
But how do you do that?
A skills matrix is one tool you can use to help you resource the workforce you have now and plan for the future. It can give you an overview of the current skills landscape at your organization and make it easier to pinpoint gaps you need to fill.
In this guide, we dig into the ins and outs of skills matrices and how you can use them to inform your decisions.
A skills matrix is a tool that maps employees’ skills, knowledge, attitudes and behaviors to core competencies. It can help you match the right people with the right projects. Plus, it makes it easier to pinpoint skill gaps you need to fill for future roles, whether by upskilling, outsourcing or bringing on new talent.
Typically, a skills matrix will take the form of a table or grid—listing various attributes and describing each person’s level of proficiency and interest in them.
Although many people use the terms competency and skill interchangeably, these two words mean very different things, especially in the corporate learning space. When you’re training, evaluating or hiring an…
Skills matrices have valuable roles to play at various stages across the employee lifecycle:
Overall, skills matrices help leaders make data-driven, informed decisions about their workforce.
There are many different benefits to using skills matrices at your organization. Here are a few common ones.
Because a skills matrix highlights job-specific weaknesses and strengths, it can act as a starting point for self-improvement in the workplace.
During one-on-one check-ins, for example, you can use a matrix to guide conversations around ongoing development. Perhaps it’s a course you’ve come across that would support an area the employee knows they want to grow in. Or maybe there’s an opportunity to mentor a junior member of the team who wants to learn more about something a more senior member is exceptionally skilled at.
It’s about helping people get ahead in their careers by finding opportunities to grow that suit their goals and availability.
Employee satisfaction often comes down to finding an effective balance between comfort and challenge. People want to know they’re doing good work, but they also want to be able to take on new tasks and grow. A skills matrix can enable the achievement of both goals.
Here are 19 of the many employee retention strategies you can implement to keep your best talent.
Every company has specific processes and ways of doing things. This can help teams work more efficiently, but it can seem daunting for people who are new to a role or organization. With the help of a skills matrix, employees can get clear, consistent visibility into what competencies they need, how they’ll use them and what their own linear career progression could look like.
They can also explore new, nonlinear ways in which they can put their skills to use. If there’s another department they want to join, do they have the competencies they need to excel in an open role?
While we usually think about career growth vertically, a lot of growth actually happens horizontally.Rosanne Holmes learning and development manager (former), D2L
At a high level, getting started with skills matrices comes down to answering a few fundamental questions:
An employee skills matrix can be the fuel needed to create an effective organizational skill map. For a more detailed breakdown, read on.
When evaluating your employees’ abilities in your selected skills, you can use a simple rating scale from 0 to 3 and test where people stand. For example:
One way to evaluate your employees’ abilities is to ask them to give themselves a score. Another approach is to use a 360-degree evaluation. In addition to the employees themselves, this allows team members and managers to provide feedback on employees’ performance. It can help paint an accurate picture of their strengths and weaknesses.
Everyone has unique knowledge, skills, abilities and behaviors that they bring to their work. It’s the right blending of everyone’s talents that makes an organization successful.
With a skills matrix, you can use those individual preferences, abilities and passions to your advantage. For instance, maybe you’ve identified someone highly skilled and very interested in creative problem-solving and relationship-building. They’re currently on your sales team, but they’ve expressed that they’re unsure whether sales is for them. When a new role opens on your customer support team, you know they’ll be the perfect fit, and you have the skills matrix to show why. It’s a win-win. Your company will be able to leverage their skills in the best possible way, and they will feel that you’re listening to them and care about their development.
Like the above scale, you can adopt the same idea and ask employees to rate their interests from 0 to 2.
The final step of this process is to put your results into a skills matrix. No matter what format you use, you want skills laid out on one axis and each employee’s name, capability and level of interest on the other.
You can use a table like the one below to get started:
| Employee 1 | Employee 2 | Employee 3 | |
| Proficiency/Interest | Proficiency/Interest | Proficiency/Interest | |
| Skill 1 | |||
| Skill 2 | |||
| Skill 3 | |||
| Skill 4 |
Creating a skills matrix isn’t a once-and-done activity. As your employees’ skills develop and roles are added and removed, you must revise each matrix to reflect the changes. That will give you confidence that you’re getting proper, accurate, at-a-glance representations of your workforce’s skills and will allow you to track and close skill gaps more effectively.
Be careful that you’re not stuffing your matrices with irrelevant skills. What you include should be true to your organization’s and team’s needs—otherwise, you may think you have a bigger skill gap than you do, which could lead to hiring and assigning the wrong people.
Another important tip is to avoid relying on only one assessment method. If you only ask your employees to do self-assessments to gather data, you won’t necessarily get the best idea of their skills. This is equally true if you’re only focusing on manager feedback. For the best results, get input from a mix of sources.
Lastly, don’t panic if your employees don’t possess all the hard and soft skills you’ve outlined in your matrix. Remember, one of the main reasons you’re putting a matrix together is to proactively identify where holes exist. Once you know, it becomes much easier for you and your employees to identify professional development opportunities that can close the gaps, whether they involve participating in on-the-job learning or taking advantage of external courses.
Whether you’re leading a big organization or running a small business, skills matrices can be valuable tools in helping you support talent management, employee development and business success. Simply put, they help you align the work your people do with strategic goals, fostering more agile and adaptable teams.
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