skills matrices 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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