Introducing the Visual Workforce Skill and Proficiency Matrix

Over the past few weeks, we’ve looked at what’s wrong with the traditional, Excel-based skills matrix and, in contrast, the characteristics that would define a modern, scalable approach to building skills matrices. This week, we’re excited to cap off this mini-series by introducing the Visual Workforce Skill and Proficiency Matrix.  

With Visual Workforce, there’s no need to manually build a stand-alone skills matrix in Excel ever again. Our smart, scalable Skill and Proficiency Matrix visualization delivers familiarity to long-time Excel users, while simultaneously leveraging the power, scalability, and integration of the Visual Workforce platform. When we examined the ideal characteristics of a modern skills matrix, we identified 5 key characteristics: integrated, dynamic, automated, consistent, and scalable. Let’s see how the Visual Workforce Skill and Proficiency Matrix stacks up against a traditional skills matrix in Excel.

Integrated

The Skill and Proficiency Matrix is tightly integrated into the broader Visual Workforce skills management and workforce visualization platform. Organizations can take advantage of industry-based skills libraries filled with role-specific hard and soft skills and a powerful survey engine to streamline the process of cataloguing skills and collecting relevant skill and proficiency data from employees.

The platform makes it simple, easy, and intuitive for organizations to transform their raw data about skills and proficiencies into powerful, insightful skills matrices – all pulling from a single, centralized skills data repository. By building skills matrices through Visual Workforce, organizations eliminate the problems commonly associated with standalone, Excel-based skills matrices.

Dynamic

Visual Workforce delivers a pre-built Skill and Proficiency Matrix that makes it radically simple to compare employees on the fly. Users just need to select the people, skills, and proficiency levels that they want to analyze, and Visual Workforce will build a custom skills matrix in seconds.

Want to analyze a different team? Want to change the proficiency requirement for a skill? Looking to view just soft skills? We have you covered – changing the view is as easy as selecting different filter criteria and re-running the visualization. Visual Workforce gives organizations the ability to slice and dice their core skill and proficiency data to quickly build any number of different skill matrices.

Automated

As a manager or decision-maker, the last thing you want is a tool that takes manual effort to keep up to date. Traditional skill matrices are heavily reliant on manual data entry and upkeep, which can be a major hurdle for organizations to overcome when rolling out a skills management initiative. Visual Workforce eliminates the need for tedious manual data entry and analysis – allowing organizations to get value out of their skills data more quickly and helping to ensure that decision-makers are always looking at the most up to date data.

The platform’s powerful survey engine allows managers to quickly survey thousands of employees with just a few clicks, and once those survey responses start to roll in, the data automatically flows directly into the Skill and Proficiency Matrix – so, there is no need to manually input data or spend time worrying that your information is out of date.

Consistent

Visual Workforce gives organizations the ability to deploy a consistent, standard approach to skills matrices across the organization. Proficiency scores are standardized during the implementation phase to ensure that everyone is speaking a common language when it comes to the meaning of individual proficiency ratings (i.e. a rating of a ‘4’ means the same thing to a sales director as someone in HR or on the executive leadership team).

In addition to fostering an environment in which organizations can deploy standard proficiency definitions, Visual Workforce also gives organizations the ability to build a wide variety of skills matrices that all share a similar form, function, and look and feel – giving decision-makers the ability to seamlessly pivot from focusing on a single team or project to looking at the organization as a whole.

Scalable

With Visual Workforce, organizations can start small and grow with a platform that delivers the freedom and flexibility to meet the unique needs of their organization. Whether you are looking to staff a single project or roll out an organization-wide skills management initiative, Visual Workforce can help.

Interested in learning more? Check out our new whitepaper The Modern Skills Matrix: A New Take on a Classic Tool for more information on our powerful new approach to building skills matrices. Or, if you’re ready to take the next step, schedule some time with a product expert who can show you how to take your skills matrix beyond the spreadsheet.