As an employer you need to ensure that your team possesses the right skills to lead your projects to success. Employees who lack crucial skills are less happy and productive, because it is hard for them to do the job they are not equipped to handle. There's a working solution to ensure that you have the right people for the job - Skills matrix.
Introducing the skills matrix
Skills matrix is a framework used to map and visualize required skills for your employees. A completed skills matrix can define the skill gaps in your team and help with hiring, upskilling or reskilling.
If you update your skills matrix regularly, you'll be able to monitor skill acquisition progress, analyze, and evaluate the effectiveness of your team's efforts.
A well-designed skills matrix is valuable for a company as it can help design customized training programs, reduce overhead costs and enhance employee satisfaction.
What are the benefits of using a skills matrix?
Make your team members aware of their skills. Showing employees where they excel and where they need to improve makes them more aware of the skills they should focus on as well as makes them acknowledge current proficiencies.
Determine where new hires are required. Knowing the skill gaps enables finding people with the required skills for your projects.
Identify weak areas. Ensure that missing skills do not hinder teams performance.
Outline expectations. When employees are aware of the expectations for their role, they know what to do to be more effective in it.
Find your key players, aka most valuable employees with special qualities easily.
How to create a skills matrix?
The first step is to clearly outline which skills are required to complete a project. Be specific while defining the skills because they are the blueprint of what is expected from the employees.
The second step in creating a successful skills matrix is to list team members and assess their current skill level for each skill you've outlined in the first step. Here's a simple rating system example:
No experience
Beginner
Intermediate
Advanced
Using this scale, you can indicate each employee's competence level on the skills matrix.
The third step is rating each team member's level of interest in skills they possess or learning a new one. Ask your employees to provide their interest level for each skill. Letting employees work on tasks that they enjoy or have an interest in helps to prevent burnout.
The fourth step is to determine missing skills using the information from previous steps. You can either train employees who are interested in these skills or hire new employees who are already proficient.
Skills matrix frameworks and software
Updating a skill matrix in an Excel spreadsheet and keeping it up to date is a Herculean task. Using software, frameworks and other tools to simplify and automate the process is always a better choice.
The right software is a key to success and a huge time-saver. You'll need it to track and manage skills, to unify the information, and to access everything in a few clicks. This is where we want to introduce you to Skiloope.
Our software makes creating, using and updating skills matrices easier by introducing you to a built-in shareable templates system. We make tracking, learning, and coaching accessible with a simple automated flow.
Skiloope is a powerful solution for your company. You can read more about it here and get a cost estimation for your business via hello@skiloope.com email.
