A skills matrix can help you to understanding the mixture of skills and experience in your team, which is critical for any leader.
You may also hear this tool called a competency matrix.
In this post, I’m going to take you through what a skills matrix is, why it’s important and how you can create one.
And lastly, I’ll cover some ways to use the skills matrix so you can get the most benefit in your team.
What Is a Skills Matrix?
Let’s start with the basics. What is a skills matrix anyway?
A skills matrix is a table that describes the current mixture of skills, competencies, qualifications and experience in a team.
Skills might include physical skills, such as driving a forklift, or they may include knowledge-based skills like writing business cases or reports.
It can also be useful to include qualifications in a skills matrix. Going back to our forklift example, some employees may hold a forklift “ticket” (qualification) that qualifies them to be able to use a forklift.
This can also include technical certifications that indicate you are proficient using different software, systems or technical tools. Of course, it can also include education such as diplomas or university degrees.
You can also include experience in a skills matrix. This might include the amount of time spent working in different industries or on different types of projects.
The mixture of what you include is up to you, and you’ll be able to decide what is relevant as we work through this post.
Why Is a Skills Matrix Useful?
There are many reasons why a skills matrix might help you in your leadership role.
Thoughtful leaders will appreciate it because it helps you plan for the future, reduce risk and make sure your people are working on the right things.
Creating a Skills Matrix is a valuable exercise because it can assist you to:
- Understand the current skills and experience within your team.
- Identify skill gaps, where your team is lacking skills and experience.
- Find high-risk areas where you are relying on a single person to complete critical tasks. This can help to identify opportunities for improving skills across other members of the team, to reduce the risk.
- Justify requests for additional resources, to fill identified skill gaps.
- Plan the way forward when trying to introduce new skills or approaches to your team; and
- Restructure your team to improve its effectiveness.
You can also use a skills matrix to map out the minimum requirements for your team to operate successfully.
For example, you might identify that you need two qualified engineers in your team, or multiple people with forklift tickets, so that if someone gets sick, has an accident or quits, you have a backup.
You can then have these minimum requirements agreed with and approved by your own manager, so that you can more easily justify hiring or training new resources when you need them.
Learn More: Struggling at Work? Try Building a Better Working Relationship With Your Boss.
How to Create a Skills Matrix (or Competency Matrix)
Step 1. List the skills and experience you need in your team
The first step to create your Skills Matrix is listing the key skills and experience that you want for your team. Create a simple table with each skill or experience as a row in the table.
When creating your list, include:
- Current skills or experience: The skills, competencies or experience that your team members use today to perform their role.
- Future skills or experience: Skills, competencies or experience that your team will need in the future as you plan to use new approaches or tools.
An example of a skill may be the ability to use a certain tool, method or technology. For example, you may add “Graphic Design” as a skill.
However, you may break this down further to list different types of graphic design or tools e.g. Graphic Design using the Photoshop application.
Experiences refer to different situations in which skills have been applied.
For example, you may list Dealing with Senior Management as an experience, which represents having worked closely with senior leaders at a company.
You may add different industry experience here too e.g. Manufacturing, Retail, Healthcare, IT.
To help organise the Skills Matrix, you may want to group similar skills or experiences together. Shading them a different colour may help you to see the different groupings more easily.
Step 2. List the members of your team
The columns of your table should list each member of your team. Again, you may group the team members into categories if there is a good way to do so.
By the end of this step, you should have an empty skills matrix, ready to fill in. The skills and experiences are the row headings and the column headings are your team members.
Step 3. Select the skills and experiences of your team members
Finally, you need to enter the skills and experience that each team member has. In each cell, place a tick (✓) to indicate that the team member has the skill or experience. If not, just leave it empty.
Now you have a skills matrix containing the key skills and experiences of your team.
Note that you may also find it beneficial to rate each team member based on their level of competency, rather than just a simple tick or cross.
A common system is to use ratings like:
- No skill or competency (O)
- Minimal skill (M)
- Competent (C)
- Expert (E)
This means you can get more detailed about what you need in your team.
For example, if your team runs payroll for the company, you might need a few Experts to run the payroll, as well as one Competent backup person.
How to Use Your Skills Matrix
1. Use your Skills Matrix to find skill gaps and high-risk areas
If there are important skills or experiences that only a few team members have, this may be a skill gap.
A skill gap will make it difficult for your team to function and potentially create a bottleneck where only one person can do the work.
A high-risk area (or a single point of failure) is one where there is only a single person who has an important skill for your team. If this team member leaves or cannot work for any reason, you’re going to have a crisis on your hands.
Both of these issues can be fixed by cross-training your team or hiring someone new to ensure that there are enough of the appropriate skills in your team.
Learn More: Improving team performance through cross training.
2. Use your Skills Matrix to plan development opportunities
Some team members may only use a few skills during their work. These people may be candidates for training or mentoring to add variety and additional skills to their role.
When used in this way, the Skills Matrix becomes a valuable tool when it comes to managing performance.
If you are planning to introduce new processes or tools to your team, you can use the Skills Matrix to plan for the training needed.
You simply need to decide how much of each skill you need, then you can organise the level of training or on the job learning that is suitable.
Learn More: Risk & Reward: How to Provide Development Opportunities For Your Team.
3. Use your Skills Matrix to improve accountability
You may notice on your Skills Matrix that some people have multiple relevant skills, where others only use a few in their role. This will give you an idea of the specialists and generalists in your team.
You may be able to delegate accountability for key team tasks to a technical specialist to play a lead role in their chosen area. This will take some workload off you and give your team members a chance to step up and play a bigger part in the team.
This can often lead to better outcomes because specific team members will begin to take ownership of key team functions and make sure they are functioning well.
4. Use your Skills Matrix to justify additional resourcing
A skills or competency matrix can be a great tool if you plan to hire more resources in your team, especially if you need to justify it to senior management.
If you can show where you have skill gaps or a single point of failure in your team, you may have a better chance of bringing on new people to reduce the risk.
Sometimes the exercise of visualising the skills in your team using the Skills Matrix can highlight problems better than just using words.
Even better, have your desired skill matrix signed off by upper management, and then it will be harder for them to disagree when you want to hire more people!
How Detailed Should a Skills Matrix Be?
You might be wondering just how detailed a skills matrix needs to be to be useful.
Well, it really depends on your team. It’s best to look at an example.
Let’s say a leader runs a nursing team.
If everyone in the team is a qualified nurse, then it’s not very useful to say whether they’re a qualified nurse or not … because we know that already.
However, you may have nurses with different levels of qualifications and experiences that let them handle different types of patients, within different specialties in the hospital.
For example, some may be experienced working in the Emergency Department, Intensive Care or Neonatal (newborn) care.
Getting to this level of detail may help you create rosters for the nursing team, as well as deciding who will be in charge of a nursing shift.
As you can see, it will depend on what’s going to be most useful in your specific situation.
A Skills Matrix Can Really Help Thoughtful Leaders
A skills matrix not only helps to find out the potential risks or improvement areas in your team, but it also builds your credibility.
Creating the matrix shows people that you’ve done some forward-thinking.
You’re not just waiting for something bad to happen, you’re being proactive and responsible so that you can keep your team running well, even when challenges arise.
Why not create one for your team today?
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Do you find a Skills Matrix useful? Why or why not? Let me and all the other thoughtful leaders know in the comments below!
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