Skills Matrix

A skills matrix is a popular way of working out whether you have a sufficient depth and breadth of skills within your organisation. It also helps you to identify skills weaknesses and any single-points-of-failure (SPOF) risks where your department would lose capability from a person leaving.

In the simplest form: you identify a few technologies you need skills in, and management can assess the skill level of their team members, and make a case for improvements.

But ideally, you want to use a skills matrix in a structured way to tactically:

flush out skills you were unaware of
set an expectation of continuous learning in your teams
identify what training resources will provide most value for money
give you the information to plan your knowledge risks, and more...

My skills matrix has five main parts

Identify the qualities or technologies you want to measure.
Identify key roles, and set a minimum baseline of what skills you need in those roles
Send out a questionnaire to individuals to tell you what skills they have. Pre-populate it with skills you require a response on, but allow others to be added.
Generate a skills matrix from the gathered responses
Generates a "Training Needs Assessment" per individual that can be shared with them (save page as PDF). It lets you rank them against their peers and the department as a whole, whether they lack skills you require in their role, and prioritise their next development targets.

Spreadsheet is designed to be split, so individuals can't see other responses, and much of the data can be stored as lists in sharepoint. The needs assessment can be saved as PDF before sharing. In addition, you can analyse the data to give a birds-eye view on single-points-of-failure (see samples below)

My skills matrix has five main parts

Examples