Skills Matrix Archives - Skills Base

What is a skills matrix? [FREE Excel Template]

Nick — Thu, 09 May 2024 00:09:56 +0000

With workplaces embracing flexible working styles, remote opportunities, and global footprints, as well as employees asking for clear career progression and communication, keeping track of staff skills and knowledge is essential. Skills analysis has never been more important, and a skills matrix is a great way to visualize skill gaps and strengths.

Organizations can have hundreds, if not thousands, of skills and people across different geographic locations. It’s still important to visualize these skills via a skills matrix, but the process needs to be automated to free up time for creating reports so that time can be invested in analyzing the data at hand and acting on those insights.

Skills matrices are nothing new but have generally been locked away within the HR function. The changing nature of skills (granularity, dynamic nature, and a workforce that isn’t as rigid), means that the rapid identification of these skill gaps and strengths is critical to informing decisions across a business.

What is a skills matrix?

A skills matrix is a tool used to map out a visual representation of the skills and capabilities of employees. It’s laid out in a grid format, making it simpler to assess and evaluate team capabilities at a glance. Cataloging the abilities of individuals or teams, allows leaders and decision-makers to easily assess the mix of skills and capabilities in a team or group, create new teams, identify skill gaps, and assess recruitment needs. Empowering managers and organizations to make informed choices for strategic workforce planning, resource allocation, and recruitment decision-making.

A skills matrix is also often referred to as a competency matrix, however, they aren’t the same thing. Skills and competencies are related but there are key differences between the two, for the purpose of this article we will be covering the specifics of a skills matrix and skills management.

What is a skills matrix used for?

A skills matrix is used for identifying the skills, competencies and proficiency levels within teams and the wider organization. It helps with:

Project Planning: Facilitating better team composition and project assignment based on skill sets, assessing whether a team has the necessary skills to complete a project successfully, and identifying when additional talent is needed.
Team Formation: Facilitating the creation of new teams with complementary skills for specific projects or initiatives, ensuring each team is able to handle their assigned tasks.
Identifying Skill Gaps: Highlighting areas where skills may be lacking in a team, department or the broader organization
Resource Allocation: Ensuring optimal assignment of tasks based on individual skills and capabilities, enhancing overall productivity.
Cross-Training: Identifying opportunities for effective upskilling, reskilling and cross skilling skill development to enhance team versatility.
Workforce Planning: Planning for future workforce development and strategic talent management. Informing learning and development programs by highlighting areas for skill enhancement across teams.
Strategic Hiring: Guiding recruitment efforts to fill specific skill gaps, making hiring more targeted and effective.
Career Pathing: Helping employees understand potential career paths within the organization and aligning their development with organizational needs.

How a skills matrix benefits different parts of the business

Reporting and analyzing skills should be a staple of any industry or business type. Within these businesses there are several core functional areas where rapidly understanding skill gaps and strengths is important, including:

Hiring & Recruitment

Quickly see the skill gaps and strengths at a team or organizational level. This data can be used to support decisions about the current business skill landscape, and support the investment and justification to hire a certain skill set for now or in the future.

Training & Learning

Get a baseline of skills and competencies of people or teams across the business. Use this visualization to see comparable skill levels, and set pathways for people to complete courses and learnings to improve a skill set over time.

Training & Learning

Workforce Planning

Visualize the current skill makeup of project teams to see if it meets a customer brief, and ensure the skill set is there to add value to customers and drive revenue.

Internal Mobility / Employee Experience

Give people the ability to see where they compare with their peers. Ensure they meet the competency targets you set, but also give people the opportunity to join different teams that align to their skill set, and find coaches and mentors who are adept in certain skills.

How to create and use a skills matrix

Whether you’re using software, pen and paper, or a skills matrix tool, the steps to create a skills matrix is fairly consistent:

Step 1: Build a taxonomy of skills

The first thing you need to do to create your skills matrix is put together a list of skills for your team, workforce or organization. This underlying dataset is the foundation to your broader skills management strategy and is critical to informing many decisions, and applying the next crucial steps.

Step 2: Invite your team

Next, you want to identify who within your team or organization needs to be a part of this process and then associate them with the relevant skills. At this stage it’s also important to also identify the teams, roles and geographic locations that they belong to — as it will help with reporting in the long run.

Step 3: Assess your team on those skills

The assessment process is critical and provides the actual data that you need to define skill levels. Skills Base advocates its structured-subjective approach to skills assessment involving the employee self assessing their skills and interests.

Step 4: Report with a skills matrix

Finally, when you have this data in place, and your team is beginning to assess their skill levels, you can automatically report on this skill level and competency data in the form of a skills matrix. Whether it’s creating an employee skills matrix, a skills matrix for a team, or a large skills matrix of the organization’s skill set.

The benefits of using a skills matrix tool is that when you get the underlying data right, build up a rigid assessment process, creating your skills matrix can be completed in seconds.

Why use skills matrix software? Scale, Integrity, & Agility

We have already touched on a few reasons why skills matrix software can be a great option if you want to implement a skills matrix in your organization, but there are many more benefits over the more manual options people have traditionally used.

Many people ask why Excel isn’t the best option. The explosion of skills data, agility required and decisions made means that spreadsheets just can’t keep up. The process needs to be automated, and it needs to be a part of a larger skills management strategy that focuses on your skills taxonomy, skills assessment processes, and skills that are mapped to projects and training. You also need to be able to create skills matrices in real time. Using software means this process is entirely streamlined and laid out for you.

Looking for a skills matrix tool?

Our skills experts are here to help you make it a reality — Book now for a no obligation meeting.

Understand Your Gaps: A Free Skills Matrix Excel Template

If you’re not quite ready to invest in dedicated skills management software but still want to start implementing a skills matrix, we’ve got you covered. To help you get started, we offer a free Skills Matrix Excel template. This template is a great place to start if you have never used a skills matrix before or need a good base to build from. It serves as an introductory tool, allowing you to begin mapping out your team’s skills and identifying key areas for development.

By filling in your team’s details, our downloadable spreadsheet will give you a better understanding of your employees’ skills so you can find the gaps and opportunities in your team. As with any manual matrix, this does have its limitations but it is a great way to familiarize yourself with tracking and auditing skills.

Find your skill gaps now

How to use the free skills matrix template

The free template is designed to give you the basics required to start your journey on building a skills-based company. Using it is easy:

Add team member names in the relevant column
Add the required skills for either a particular role/process or skills required for the whole team to adequately function
Adopt the predefined rating system and evaluate your team members on their competency levels of current skills, as well as their interest level in each skill
Review the information gathered to easily view and act on the areas of strength in your staff and any skill gaps.

These steps can also be found in the Excel template, along with further information around how to make the most of this skills matrix tool.

What to do once you have outgrown the template

While this template is useful, it is also designed for small teams and can be quite manual, as well as requiring version management to ensure sharing does not result in missing or incorrect data. When you want to move on to something that offers speed, automation, and ease of sharing, as well as the ability to scale with you, there are lots of great options. In fact, we even have a free option in our training matrix software that is perfect for smaller teams and can grow with you.

Over to you

Getting started with a skills matrix can be quite eye-opening, especially if you’ve never visualized your team’s skills this way. If you’re just beginning or working with a small team, our free Excel template can be a great starting point. It’s simple, straightforward, and gives you a clear snapshot of where your team stands today.

However, as your needs grow and become more complex, you might find this manual method limiting. Lacking the scalability and depth required for effective skills management. That’s when Skills Base can step in with a more advanced solution that grows with your organization.

Ready to take the next step? Explore Skills Base’s full capabilities and see how we can help you keep pace with change and prepare for the future.

The post What is a skills matrix? [FREE Excel Template] appeared first on Skills Base.

Your IT Skills Matrix; Friend or Foe?

Nick — Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:27:42 +0000

Today’s technical world is rapidly advancing and if you’re a manager of an IT team or technical organization, one of your biggest challenges may be overcoming the digital skills gap.

Finding the best talent, upskilling your current workforce, and keeping up with the demand to deliver projects better and faster every time is no easy task. There has never been a more critical time to see your team’s makeup clearly so you can attract, retain, and train your IT staff to ensure gaps in skill do not threaten overall performance and results.

How to overcome IT skills gaps

A skills matrix is a great tool in any business or industry but becomes even more beneficial for fields like IT, software development, and cyber security which warrant more tracking and updating of skills due to the rapidly changing landscape of the industry. Creating and managing a staff skills matrix allows you to easily visualize individual, team and organization-wide IT skills and determine where effort needs to be put in to hire or upskill staff and overcome gaps.

Calculating the competency levels of employees starts with a few questions:

What are the skills that are important to your workforce now?
What are the skills that are needed in the future?
How are these skills mapped to people, roles, teams and office locations?
What are the necessary proficiency levels in each of these skills?

These core questions all help outline the foundation to creating and building your skills library. The next step is to create a scalable IT skills assessment framework, that allows each employee to consistently measure their skill levels in an efficient and scalable way. (we’ve actually created a checklist to get you on your way.)

After you have all the foundation information, it comes down to building the matrix itself.

Competency and skills matrix tools

The best way to collect, compare, and update skill levels is through a custom matrix. There are lots of ways to create a skills matrix, with some people choosing Excel or a Google Sheet, which can be good for small teams and smaller skill sets but given the complexity of IT and technical teams, we recommend using skills management software.

The right skills matrix software can collate team, skills, and opportunities to give you a full picture of your team. From creating the perfect team and finding gaps to career planning and upskilling, good software can automate everything so you can make educated, positive decisions for your organization and team.

Getting team buy-in

A skills matrix isn’t just for management or organization benefit – it helps companies on every level.

It’s not uncommon for individuals to see a skills matrix as a foe, something that is a burden and won’t really help them personally, but really they can be a great friend when used correctly. It gives insight into someone’s competencies and where they can learn and grow, arming them with the data to back up training requests and even promotions and pay rises, as well as identify when an individual might need help. If you work in IT, having transparency in your skills and any gaps means you can continue to learn in a rapidly changing industry.

From a team or organizational perspective, the benefits are many. As a team, it is easier to see how everyone’s skills work together and where there is room for improvement or growth. Team members can easily identify who can help them or where they can step up. Organizations can clearly pinpoint where they can invest their learning and development budget and how to find hidden gems in their current workforce, preventing the move to hire new staff until genuinely needed, while also helping staff grow and increasing retention.

Finally, a skills matrix can mean better results and happier clients, stakeholders, and teams in different areas. Whether internal or external, by knowing team skills and where to train, everyone benefits.

Want to supercharge your tech teams? Keep your IT department up to speed with technological changes by regularly assessing skill and competency levels across your workforce with Skills Base. We work with technical teams every day and understand how important understanding employee skills and competencies is, so get in touch to see how we can help!

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What is the difference between a skills matrix and a competency matrix?

Nick — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 03:01:41 +0000

Whether you’re looking for a new job, writing a job description, or assembling a team, one thing you are bound to come across is “skills” and “competencies”. If you thought they were the same thing, you’re not alone! However, while they are definitely related, the two terms also have some key differences, and we are going to break them down in this article.

What are skills?

The term “skill” can have many definitions in its broad use, however, in the context of skills management, a skill is a granular, learned ability possessed by a person, and especially the proficiency in performing or executing that ability. We say “granular”, because when it comes to something like optimizing training, or allocating employees to projects, being specific really counts!

A few examples of skills

It’s important that skills data should become a common language across your workforce and organization. Without a clear foundation in terms of your skills taxonomy your employees and teams will have a greater range of subjective interpretation.

If we were to look into someone in a software developer role a few of their skills could include:

Java,
Data Entry,
HTML 5,
AWS Kubernetes. or
Working Remotely

It is all about what a person can (or cannot) do.

What are competencies

Competencies are a combined set of abilities, desire, and knowledge required to be considered “competent” in performing or executing a particular function. Competencies form the basis for measuring the capabilities of an organization’s workforce. Competency tracking systems help organization’s stay across staff skill abilities, desires and knowledge.

It is also critical for managers to create competency targets for their business as a way to understand their ability to properly track skills or groups of skill sets at the desired level or output.

A few examples of competencies

Competencies are those that can benefit the business in a strategic way and give an overview of whether or not someone can perform a skill or perform a group of skills in a valid way. Taking the software developer example above a few examples include:

Competence in using the skill Java,
Competence in Back-end Language Skills,
Competence in Software and Digital Skills

Why both skills and competency tracking is valuable

The main difference between these two terms is, to put it very simply, competencies are broader than skills. A competence combines knowledge, skills, and ability together, where a skill is a part of a competence. Understanding both someone’s skills and competencies can be very valuable for businesses and hiring managers, as well as individuals who want visibility of their career progression.

Visualizing through a skills and competency matrix

Skills and competency matrix software, can help with visualizing what a person can do and how they can contribute to a team or organization. And, unlike Excel, it can be used to track, measure and visualize data in real-time regardless of being at an employee, team or organization level.

A matrix or framework can help map out skills and competencies so decision makers have a clear picture of teams and individuals and staff can see how they are progressing. They can make creating teams easier, pinpoint where there are skill gaps, find people with skills you wouldn’t typically know they had, link training outcomes to skill and competency levels and help cover staff that are sick or away.

A Skill and Competency Matrix Example

Using the skills and competency reporting features in Skills Base as an example, and focusing on the software developer role we discussed earlier, we can start to get a clearer picture of what it all might look like. This image (using some dummy data) reports on the skill levels, and competency levels for this specific employee.

If we take a closer look at a specific skill ( Java ) You will be able to see a few things. As an organization we have said that we need all employees to have a skill level of at least 2. This employee unfortunately only has a assessed skill rating of 1. Therefore they are only 50% competent in completing this skill.

Having this data visualized and mapped out means that from a training perspective, a manager can work collaboratively with an employee to improve their skill level. Whether it’s through online courses, new qualifications or coaching.

If we take a step back and look at the broader category of Back-End Languages, this employee is well and truly above target in PHP, and if we average those ratings out, (2.5 skill level) the employee will have a competence rating of 75% in Back-End language skills.

As you can start to imagine, this starts to paint a powerful picture for the skills and competencies of an employee, team or organization as a whole. Opening up the opportunity for data driven Workforce planning, employee experience and business decisions.

Want to start tracking skills and competencies today? We can help! Our team can assist in getting started, looking into your skills-based technology stack, or just figuring out what is the next best step. Send through an enquiry or book your demo today.

The post What is the difference between a skills matrix and a competency matrix? appeared first on Skills Base.

A Skills Matrix Tool vs Excel: Finding your Skills Gaps

Nick — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 09:47:22 +0000

Using a skills matrix to keep track of skills and competencies is a valuable tool for many organizations and HR professionals. However, over the last decade, the way in which we manage and understand skills has shifted. Skills are now the cornerstone of every element of an effective business from recruitment and retention to resource management and execution of strategy. This has resulted in an ever-expanding volume of skills to be tracked, an increase in their complexity and the need to understand technical skills in a considerably more granular way.

There are many options for crafting a skills matrix, with most organizations first looking to spreadsheets like Excel, or Google Sheets, as a simple, affordable solution. While this does work in some situations, their static, siloed nature means it may not be the ideal tool for creating your employee, team, or company skill matrix long term.

As we continue to invest in critical skills and competencies in 2021 to improve training, learning and development, workforce allocation, recruitment and business outcomes, we need to think about the tools that can help us better visualize, understand and act on our workforce’s skills gaps and strengths.

Is there a modern skills matrix tool that can scale, in an efficient, collaborative and transparent way?,

Excel struggles as a part of a broader skills management approach

Excel is a powerful tool that many organizations use across many different tasks. It offers flexibility in how it displays data, and is one of the most common pieces of software in a company’s technology stack.

However, In order to properly utilize and create a skills matrix with Excel, there are many systems, processes, integrations, and technologies that work behind the scenes in order to identify the right skills and competencies to show. This includes:

Building a taxonomy of skills,
Clearly mapping relationships between skills, employees, teams, roles and different geographic locations,
Assessing those employees in an achievable and sustainable (structured-subjective) way, and
Reporting on that underlying data via a skills matrix.

It’s this complexity that Excel and other spreadsheets struggle to manage.

Vodafone Retail NZ is just one organization that identified how Excel and spreadsheets could not manage their skills and competencies. By understanding the bigger skill management approach problem, they were able to bring all of their skills and assessment data into one place to create a single source of truth. From this they can now take advantage of a real-time Skills Matrix that can be used to easily spot the skills gaps and opportunities across their workforce to make informed planning, training and learning decisions.

5 Reasons to use a skills matrix tool over Excel

While Excel and Google Sheets have an important place in any organization, when it comes to a competent skills matrix, a purpose-built option far outweighs it – but why? Here are 5 reasons:

1. Scale

Excel is great at reporting on small, medium and large datasets, but it is not made specifically with a skills matrix in mind. Today, there are thousands of skills to consider and having specific software provides automatic tracking and reporting, with simple creation of employee, team, and organization level skills matrices at any scale.

2. Speed

Creating and maintaining an Excel spreadsheet can be labour-intensive. The software isn’t made specifically for the task of mapping skills and therefore requires starting from scratch. Keeping it updated takes significant time and effort. You then have to consider how often the document needs to be updated and when to inform relevant parties when updates have been made. A skills matrix tool can do a lot of the hard work for you.

3. Transparency

Excel documents are often stored on local devices and even if they are uploaded to the cloud or on Google Sheets, organizing them into the right place requires specific processes and education of staff. This means they are often lost in unknown locations and updated, accurate versions are difficult to find and identify. A skills matrix ensures everything is in one place, accurate, and up-to-date.

4. Data & Security

When users access an Excel sheet, their level of access is the same across different people. Even on Google Sheets, the options for access levels are limited. Who has what type of access, who is allowed to perform what type of action, or who can act in what role cannot be configured using these programs. While this makes it easy to edit a document, when it comes to skills mapping and sensitive employee information, something more secure is crucial. Global Data laws including GDPR, CCPA can also come into play here. Skills matrix software that is made with good security in mind can allow permission based read and write access for different employees within an organization.

5. Actionable

Excel can gather lots of data but collating data from many different sources and turning that into something actionable can be difficult. Skills matrix data can be linked with HR, Learning Management systems, and training systems to support key decisions. You can track and view skill trends over time to see what’s working and what isn’t, as well as quickly determining what to act on from these trends.

Finding a purpose-built skills matrix tool

So, what are the alternatives to Excel and Google Sheets? Today, HR Systems and Skills
Management Systems come in many forms to suit different applications. HR Systems have
more functionality and better user experience than Excel but focus on broader skill types. If you are looking for something specifically made for building a skills library, data mapping, assessing employees, and then reporting via a skills matrix tool, a Skills Management system is a powerful addition to your arsenal.

Skills Management Systems remove the problems of Excel and offer an easy
solution for tracking and management of team skills, their career progression, and skills gaps.

Looking for a skills matrix tool? Skills Base can help you build a robust data-driven skills
platform simply, with the ability to scale up or down as needed. If you need help getting started
or you’re reviewing your skills technology stack, book in a demo, or get in touch today.

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Introducing the new interactive skills matrix for all Skills Base customers

Nick — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 23:45:03 +0000

With the end of the year almost here, we’re excited to announce a new major feature release that’s available to all Skills Base customers.

Say hello to the new interactive Skills Matrix. All employees and supervisors now have one consolidated location to view and in some cases edit:

Skill level based on self assessment
Skill level based on supervisor assessment
The difference in skill levels
The average skill level
The target skill level
Competency level based on your self assessment
Competency level based on your supervisor assessments
The average competency level rating

If interest levels are enabled on your account you will also have visibility into:

Interest level based on self assessment
Interest level based on supervisor assessment
The difference in interest levels

If you want to learn more about each of these metrics in more detail, head across to the knowledge base article.

Where can I find the new interactive skills matrix?

The new skills matrix feature is an update to all employee dashboards. We’ve altered the navigation menu to replace the old “Detail” tab with a new “Skills” tab.

From this new view you can easily see your holistic skill and competency levels– Giving you control to understand where your strengths are, and what opportunities you have to improve on.

Edit Skill data from within the interactive Skills Matrix

Skill ratings can be edited (where enabled) directly in the matrix, and skill, interest and competency values are color-coded using the Heat Matrix colour schemes which are set when generating a Skills Matrix report.

You will also see some new definitions in “active skills” and “inactive skills”. Active skills are those that were assessed in either (or both of) the previous self or supervisor assessment, whereas Inactive Skills are those which no longer appear on any dashboards or reports due to not being assessed in any recent assessment.

Dig deeper into each skill detail and trends

The previous “Detail” tab screens are still easily accessible. In order to reach this information you can now access them by clicking on the skill category names.

We’re really excited to have this feature released to the Skills Base community. If you have any feedback, looking for a demo or want to request a new feature, don’t hesitate to reach out to the team.

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