4 Limitations That Spell the End for the Traditional Skills Matrix

If you’ve worked as an HR professional or people manager over the past thirty years, chances are you’re familiar with the skills matrix. It’s been used for everything from project staffing to skills gap analysis, succession planning, and even as a component in M&A discussions around human capital. Unfortunately, the Excel-based skills matrix that many of us have come to love over the years has some serious technical limitations.

That’s why we’re here to tell you: The traditional skills matrix is dead.

If that seems like a bold statement, ask yourself this: can an Excel-based approach to building skills matrices successfully adapt to the changing needs and requirements of modern business? We don’t know about you, but we’re not holding our breath. Let’s look at a few of the technological limitations that have doomed the traditional skills matrix to your desktop’s recycling bin.

Limited Integration into the Broader Data Ecosystem

Most skills matrices that exist today are one-off projects that are completed based on the initiative of an individual manager or project leader. They’re created to tackle a specific business problem or get an answer to a specific question around an employee’s skills. This results in skills matrices that are entirely separate from the rest of the organization’s data ecosystem, meaning that only the manager in question can effectively interpret and use the data. In reality, without a way to tie data back to a centralized skills management repository, the one-off skills matrix has a useful lifespan that is directly tied to its’ creators continued employment with the company or the passing on of tribal knowledge.

Accuracy is Reliant on Manual Data Entry

No matter how you cut it, a skills matrix is only as good as the data it displays. With a traditional, Excel-based skills matrix, getting that data right relies on tons of manual data entry. This reliance is a major reason why skills matrices have historically been “one and done” initiatives – there is enough of an incentive to do the job right at first to answer a specific question or make a decision regarding a specific project, but keeping a skills matrix up-to-date over time is just too tedious for most people to bother with. The result is a fragmented, incomplete view of skills and competencies across an organization.

Structure Varies from Manager to Manager

When skills management falls to the initiative of an individual manager, chaos ensues. Imagine a 5,000-person consulting firm where each lead consultant is responsible for building a skills matrix for their direct reports. Without proper guidance and a cohesive approach, the organization has no hope of getting a realistic view of the skills and proficiencies of their people; and, because there is not a consistent structure, data from one manager or team cannot be easily compared to data from another –severely limiting the overall usefulness of the skills matrix and its underlying data to the organization.

Data Management Becomes Difficult as Data Volumes Grow

Picture a skills matrix comparing five employees across seven different skills – not too hard to visualize, right? Now imagine you are looking to compare 2,500 people across 25 or even 30 skills – that is a much different story. Using Excel to approach the first scenario seems reasonable, using it for the latter is asking for trouble. The simple reality is that as data volumes grow, Excel-based skills matrices become harder and harder to manage – a lack of integration, issues with data entry, and inconsistent structure can all lead to a final product that is hard to maintain, inaccurate, and flat out untrustworthy.

So there you have it, the 4 technological limitations that spell the end for the traditional approach to building skills matrices in Excel. If you’re scratching your head wondering what’s next, you’re not alone. Check out our new whitepaper The Modern Skills Matrix: A New Take on a Classic Tool where we introduce a new way of thinking about building integrated, scalable skills matrices.