Rapid evolution of technology has drastically reshaped the job landscape. To stay competitive, organizations must continually adapt their workforce's skills to meet emerging challenges. A cornerstone of this adaptation is the skills matrix. This strategic tool provides a clear snapshot of the skills, competencies, and experience within an team. By identifying skill gaps and aligning them with organizational goals, organizations can optimize talent, enhance productivity, and drive innovation. 

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The Current Landscape of Skills Based Organizations 

The rise of skills based organizations is a direct response to the changing nature of work. Traditional job roles are becoming increasingly fluid, and the demand for specialized skills is growing exponentially. Skills based organizations prioritize individual capabilities over job titles, empowering employees to develop and leverage their talents effectively. This shift has necessitated the development of comprehensive skills frameworks and job architectures. 

Skills Frameworks: These frameworks provide a structured approach to identifying, assessing, and developing the skills required for various roles and projects. By categorizing skills into different levels of proficiency, organizations can create clear career paths and ensure that employees have the necessary competencies to succeed. 

Job Architecture: Job architecture defines the roles and responsibilities within an organization based on skills and competencies. This approach allows for greater flexibility and adaptability, as employees can be assigned to roles that align with their strengths and interests. 

The Value of Skills: A Data-Driven Perspective

Numerous studies have demonstrated the significant value of investing in employee skills development. According to a report by McKinsey & Company, organizations that prioritize skills development often experience higher revenue growth, improved productivity, and increased customer satisfaction.

• Increased Revenue: Companies with a strong focus on skills development have been shown to outperform their peers in terms of financial performance. By investing in their employees' capabilities, organizations can unlock new revenue streams and drive business growth.

• Improved Productivity: Employees with the right skills are better equipped to tackle complex tasks and deliver high-quality results. By closing skill gaps and providing opportunities for continuous learning, organizations can enhance productivity and efficiency.

• Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: A skilled workforce can deliver exceptional customer experiences. By investing in employee development, organizations can improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.

Why You Should Develop a Skills Matrix

Mercer’s research shows that 91% of employees are actively seeking to learn new skills, but 98% of HR leaders still report notable skill shortages in their companies.

What exactly is a skills matrix? A skills matrix is a visual representation of an organization's skills and competencies that can help with strategic decision-making, resource allocation, and planning.”

A skills matrix is the foundation of your talent management strategy. Without this tool, its difficult to get that wide-scope vision of your team’s capabilities, identify gaps, develop growth plans, and ultimately build an effective strategy. 

Developing a skills matrix is a worthwhile exercise for all managers in any field to conduct on a regular basis. Some fields, like IT, warrant a more frequent schedule due to the rapidly changing landscape of the industry. 

Build your skills matrix.

Step 1 | Define your roles, required skills, and proficiencies

Clearly outline the roles within your IT team and the specific skills required for each position. This will help you identify the core competencies needed to achieve your organizational goals.

Before you open that excel sheet and start plugging in numbers, you must answer these 3 questions:

1. What are the roles on my team? 

2. What skills do these roles require?

3. What level of proficiency should my employees have in each of these skills? 

These questions will help us set our goals and define our ideal team. This is the benchmark. Where are we now compared to where we need to be? 

Identify Critical Skills: Determine the essential skills and competencies that are crucial for your team's success. Consider factors such as industry trends, technological advancements, and organizational priorities.

Once you’ve answered these questions, you can start collecting data. 

Step 2 | Collect Data From Multiple Perspectives

After you’ve defined your roles, skills, and proficiencies it’s time to collect the data. The approach you take will depend on the type of skill you are collecting data for hard skills or soft skills. 

Hard skills are more concretely defined such as coding languages or database management. You can use tests, certificates, education, and resumes to collect data on hard skills. 

Soft skills, such as communication and collaboration, are harder to define and therefore more difficult to measure. Nevertheless, soft skills are some of the most important skills your employees can learn. To collect data on soft skills, conduct surveys that leverage multiple perspectives. For example, if you have an employee fill out a survey on their own proficiencies, also have a manager fill out the survey for that employee. Multiple perspectives will help eliminate implicit bias and differences can expose valuable insights.

Your team can also evaluate the current skill levels using a combination of performance reviews, assessments, and employee self-evaluations.

Once you’ve collected your data, you’re ready to build your skills matrix. The type of skills matrix or matrices you choose to build depends on how you plan to leverage the results. 

Step 3 | Choose And Build Your Skills Matrix (Or Matrices)

There are many different ways to develop your skills matrix. It all depends on what key question you are trying to answer. Here are some examples.

The Individual Skills Matrix

The Individual Skills Matrix allows you to compare a single employee’s current skill set and proficiencies to the ideal state of skills and proficiencies as previously defined for their role. 

This type of skills matrix can help you identify gaps in an individual’s skill set. Or it can help you identify an individual’s strengths. You can use these insights to:

1. Develop customized skills training plans to improve individual skill sets

2. Assign a project leader based on strengths identified in your skills matrix

3. Conduct more effective performance reviews that actually help your employees grow
   

The Role Skills Matrix

This type of skills matrix is ideal for people with multiple employees in the same role. For example, you may have a team of data engineers or IT project managers. Using the skills matrix, you can identify and compare current skill sets across the group. 

1. Are there single points of weakness? 

2. Are there big gaps across this entire role? 

3. What are the strengths of your team as a whole? Where could they improve?

The role skills matrix can help you answer these questions and develop a plan to address the gaps.

The Project Skills Matrix

This type of skills matrix allows you to look at a specific project and build a high-performing team of complementary skills using a data-driven approach. First, plug in the roles, skills, and proficiencies necessary for the project. Second, compare team members’ individual skills matrix to the needs of the project. Whose current skill set fits best and in what role do they belong? 

The project skills matrix is more time-consuming but will help you…

1. Eliminate any guessing when it comes to choosing your project team

2. Justify your decisions with real data

3. Elevate your team’s performance before the project even starts 

The Team Skills Matrix

This type of skills matrix gives you that true birds-eye-view of your IT team. Instead of looking at individual proficiencies, you are evaluating the team’s collective proficiency in each skill. 

The team skills matrix is designed to help you…

1. Identify any skill gaps in your team’s overall skillset

2. Bid (and win!) projects that fit best with your team’s current skillset

3. Allocate recruiting and skills training resources towards areas that will see the greatest ROI

Enterprise Skills Matrix

The Enterprise Skills Matrix is a strategic approach for a holistic view of your organization's skills landscape. By consolidating skills, competencies, certifications, learning and development, it offers a comprehensive understanding of your workforce's capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses.

• Strategic Planning: Identify skill gaps and surpluses to align your workforce with organizational goals and future projects.

• Internal Mobility: Offer people a chance to grow their skills and career through visibility into the great opportunities within the organization. Keep them curious and engaged, reduce voluntary turnover rates, and improve employee satisfaction.

• Talent Acquisition: Determine the specific skills needed for new hires and evaluate potential candidates' fit.

• Training and Employee Development: Prioritize skills training initiatives based on skill deficiencies and develop tailored programs to enhance employee capabilities.

• Performance Management: Set clear expectations, evaluate performance against skill requirements, and provide targeted feedback.

• Succession Planning: Identify potential successors for critical roles based on their skills and development potential.

• Project Management: Assemble high-performing teams by matching individual skills to project requirements.

Gather accurate and up-to-date information on employee skills through skills inventory and other available existing sources like performance reviews, assessments, and employee self-evaluations.

• Skill Categorization: Develop a consistent and meaningful skills framework for categorizing skills to ensure accurate analysis.

• Employee Skills Assessment: Focus on skills that are relevant to the employee's job responsibilities and tasks. Have employees assess their own skills against their job profile. Evaluate employees' strengths and weaknesses, and how they've performed over a period of time.

• Data Analysis: Use data analytics tools to identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement.

• Visualization: Create clear and informative visualizations (e.g., heatmaps, charts) to communicate insights effectively.

• Regular Updates: Ensure the skills matrix is regularly updated to reflect changes in employee skills, roles, and projects.

By effectively implementing an Enterprise Skills Matrix, organizations can optimize their talent, improve decision-making, and drive overall business success.

The most effective skills based organizations incorporate these key elements:

• Robust Skills Framework: A well-structured skills framework categorizes skills into different proficiency levels, providing a clear roadmap for employee development and progression. This framework should align with organizational goals and leverage industry standards.

• Comprehensive Job Architecture: A comprehensive job architecture defines roles and responsibilities based on skills and competencies, rather than solely on job titles. This allows for greater flexibility in assigning work and facilitates employee career development.

• Continuous Skill Assessment: Regular assessments of employee skills ensure that the skills matrix remains accurate and up-to-date. This information can be used to identify skill gaps, inform skills training initiatives, and support performance evaluations.

• Skill-Based Talent Management: Leveraging the skills matrix for talent management involves aligning employee skills with organizational needs, identifying high-potential individuals, and providing targeted employee skills development opportunities.

• Data-Driven Decision Making: The skills matrix provides valuable data that can inform strategic decisions, such as resource allocation, succession planning, and organizational restructuring.

Step 4 | Evaluate The Gaps and Develop a Plan

Now that you’ve built your skills matrix, the final step is to evaluate the data and develop an action plan. Depending on the question you chose to answer, insights from your skills matrix can inform your decision-making in a number of ways. 

Compare the required skills to the current skill levels of your team to identify any gaps. This information will inform your skills training and development initiatives.

No matter what your action plan will look like, always identify the gaps between current capabilities and ideal capabilities. One way to visually call out gaps is through color-coding your matrix. 

Another way is to leverage data visualizations. For example, a double bar chart can easily depict gaps for a team skills matrix. 

However you choose to define them, the skills gaps will inform the next steps you should take whether that means more recruiting, training programs, or shuffling teams. 

Step 5 | Monitor and Evaluate

Regularly review and update your skills matrix to ensure it remains aligned with your organization's goals and the evolving landscape of technology.

BONUS! Create a Dynamic Employee Skills Matrix for Better Insights

It’s important to have a clear view of your team’s capabilities at all times. Why? When things are shifting rapidly, you want to stay ahead of the changes so your team’s performance does not suffer during transformations. 

Let’s look at this another way. Continuous delivery has become an integral part of DevOps practices. The idea is to stay ahead of users’ needs with new features, constantly test for issues, and deliver faster without sacrificing the performance of the product. In product development, the goal is to always stay proactive. Reactive development leads to technical debt, poor performance, and a negative bottom line. 

The concept is no different for the people delivering those products. Managers need to ensure they are proactively upskilling their talent to meet the requirements of a rapidly changing technical landscape. 

Investing in a dynamic skills matrix tool enables managers to maintain a proactive talent management strategy without the time-consuming burden of developing a static skills matrix. A tool like this automates the process above and generates immediate insights so you can spend more time developing your action plan and building your best team yet.

Common Employee Skills Matrix Templates and Examples

Understanding different types of employee skills matrix templates can help organizations choose the right format for their needs:

• Competency-Based Skills Matrix: Maps employee competencies against specific job requirements

• Technical Skills Matrix: Focuses on hard skills and technical capabilities

• Leadership Skills Matrix: Tracks management and leadership capabilities

• Cross-Training Matrix: Shows which employees can perform different tasks across departments

How to Use an Employee Skills Matrix for Team Development

Organizations can leverage their employee skills matrix to:

1. Identify Training Opportunities, Skills Gaps and leverage Skills Density

   • Spot collective skill gaps across teams

   • Create targeted development programs

   • Leverage and encourage skills density

   • Track progress over time

2. Improve Resource Allocation

   • Match employees to projects based on skill fit

   • Identify understaffed skill areas

   • Plan future hiring needs

3. Support Career Development

   • Create clear progression paths

   • Set skill-based goals

   • Track employee growth

Measuring ROI of Employee Skills Matrix Implementation

Track these metrics to measure success:

• Reduced time-to-hire

• Improved project completion rates

• Higher employee satisfaction scores

• Decreased training costs

• Better succession planning outcomes

• Increased internal mobility rates

Future Trends in Employee Skills Matrix Development

Emerging developments to consider:

• Real-time skill tracking

• Analytics for skill needs

• Learning recommendations

FAQ Section: Employee Skills Matrix

Common questions and answers:

Q: How often should an employee skills matrix be updated?
A: Quarterly updates are recommended, with more frequent updates in rapidly changing industries.

Q: What's the difference between a skills matrix and a competency framework?
A: A skills matrix focuses on specific abilities and knowledge, while a competency framework includes broader behavioral traits and attributes.

Q: How can small businesses benefit from an employee skills matrix?
A: Small businesses can use skills matrices to identify critical skill gaps, plan training efficiently, and make informed hiring decisions.

Want to adopt an automated, dynamic skills matrix? You’re in the right place.

Learn how Visual Workforce helps you automate the discovery and optimization of the skills of your people, teams, and projects through automated, dynamic skills matrices.