To ensure optimal performance and successful hiring, businesses need to consistently conduct skill assessments for their employees, team managers, and prospective candidates. This assessment process is crucial in determining if individuals have the necessary qualifications and can align with the company's values. A comprehensive skills matrix, encompassing both hard and soft skills, provides an ideal framework for evaluating all capabilities within a unified platform. 

Consequently, a detailed skills matrix plays a fundamental role in organizing, recording, and assessing crucial skills, encompassing all the skills needed to be part of the team or company. 

But still, although it may sound easy, creating a good matrix to map skills effectively is not a child’s play. That's why this article gives you the proper tools to measure skills proficiency, identify gaps, and have the best teams and departments within your organization. Not going further, let's go straight to discover all the secrets of a Skill Matrix Template! 

A skills matrix is a framework businesses use to evaluate their employees' relevant skills. Commonly, skills matrices correspond to a grid or a spreadsheet document containing all the info about expected skills and how these are evaluated. 

Companies also use skill matrices to accelerate and improve the hiring process, being capable of identifying missing skills in prospective employees. This way, companies ensure the candidate has all the necessary employees' skills to fulfill the role properly.

Businesses also use this matrix during training programs to check the level of employee learning and whether they effectively understand topics and content. 

Businesses’ effectiveness and efficiency are directly related to the capacity of their employees to carry out crucial activities. Consequently, skills gaps can become a big problem, especially when managers do not identify these knowledge voids. Some other benefits of using this matrix are the following:   

• Matrices allow you to track your employee’s skills easily. Analyzing staff’s competencies is the primary reason why businesses utilize these documents. Matrices provide a direct approach to checking how each team member develops a particular ability.  

• It helps you to organize your teams easily. As a matrix has a grid structure, you can tag team members according to their department, tasks, or desired skills. This practice allows you to plan development programs to remedy these deficiencies. You can even identify training opportunities.  

• It allows you to hire extra staff by paying attention to skills. Incorporating new talents into existing functions or activities within teams is a clever move that organizations make to bring new ideas to the table. Using a skill matrix is the best way to identify the desired skills and whether prospective employees have them. 

• A skill matrix helps you find the best candidates for a new job. When creating new positions in your company, it's important to know the specific skills required for those roles. With new roles, there are also new responsibilities. The skill matrix assists you in assessing whether prospective candidates are capable of handling these responsibilities effectively.

• It helps you to identify skills gaps and missing competencies. We mentioned this before, but it never hurts to say it again. Identifying particular skill gaps in team members’ skills will allow your HR department to plan strategies to correct deficiencies or hire new employees with essential skills.

• It tracks employee performance and development. Creating a skills matrix lets you track individual employees’ competencies and check whether members are improving their skills and efficiency. It gives you the right information for performance evaluations and know if they meet your expectations.

Your HR team can build a skill matrix just in five simple steps. Below we describe these steps to evaluate the available skills and allocate employees to the right tasks.  

1. Identify the Proper Skills and Create Your List

The first step is to identify the specific skills each department or team requires to develop its activities correctly. Soft and hard skills, which means emotional and technical abilities, should be required. Some skills you should generally identify in all teams are the following:

• Communication;

• Management;

• Technical skills;

• Technologies;

• Problem-solving skills;

• Data analysis;

• Graphic design;

• Marketing, etc.

You can ask the entire company for the skills that employees and managers consider relevant. You can also directly inquire about team members or survey them via email to build specific skill sets. 

2. Create a Grading System to Appraise Employee’s Skills

The best way to rank the competence level of employees, managers, and other incumbents within your company is to build a grading system that establishes the evaluation guidelines.

The ranking method you build will depend on the aspects you need to evaluate and on the type of program you’ll implement. 

For example, if human resources need to implement a special induction program, HR should evaluate whether employees learned the concepts and contents taught in the program. So, in this case, the level of competence could go from 1 to 5. 

Other evaluation criteria could be the following:

• Awareness. A person with a basic skill level of a particular ability but hasn’t yet used the skill at work.  

• Novice. Someone with certain knowledge has applied the skill at work but still needs support. 

• Professional. A person with a good skill level can utilize it effectively at work. A professional is also able to solve problems according to the required skills. They have completed some training courses and can guide novices. 

• Expert. A person with significant experience applying all the skills required at work and that can coach others and fulfill a particular role. They have a lot of influence. They commonly are team leaders that share knowledge with colleagues and professionals.  

• Leading-edge-expert. A person with a wide set of skills and a great understanding of all the activities related to their role. They proactively share knowledge, ideas, and advice with all the previous ones by presenting topics at conferences, writing for magazines, etcetera. 

Another way of establishing evaluation criteria could be the following:    

0 - Having no knowledge.

1 - Has basic knowledge.

2 - Can work with support.

3 - Knows and can do it independently.

4 - Good in theory and practice and can train others.

Or the following:

0 - Not necessary.

1 - Should have a basic knowledge.

2 - Should do with support.

3 - Should know and do it independently.

4 - Should be good in theory and practice and can train.

3. Create the Spreadsheet and Add Data

At this point, the most recommended is using software that allows you to manage data and build the proper grid easily. In this sense, an appropriate skills matrix software is MS Excel since it contains all the tools and interfaces to facilitate your team's work. 

With Microsoft Excel, which you can use by acquiring a copy of Microsoft Office 2021 Professional Plus Key Retail Global, you can build your spreadsheet document to insert evaluation criteria and aspects to evaluate. So, once you get Microsoft Excel on your computer, it’s time to type the data you need. The steps for this should be the following:

• Create a title and identify the department name. It’s the most basic step and should not take more than a few minutes.   

• Create rows to insert the team members' names, their jobs, and subsequent evaluations. You should group employees by department and define how many team members need qualifications and at which level. Use a different color for each group or department.   

• Add columns for skills relating to the department or project. Build as many columns as needed to include all the skills crucial for your operation. You can also add other columns for comments, positions, responsibilities, and other relevant aspects.

• Add the gathered data on competency levels by score. The final step involves adding the crucial data you’ve collected through other media, such as surveys or direct questions. Employees and managers can also add data directly to the skill matrix. 

4. Evaluate Your Staff’s Skills

You can effectively evaluate employees, managers, and business partners with the previous information. In this sense, you can invite participants to assess in the following ways.

• Self-evaluation. Employees grade their own skills in the Excel document you provide. 

• Manager evaluation. Managers evaluate current and new team members following the specific instructions expressed in the matrix. 

• Client evaluation. Customers can give you feedback through which you evaluate your employee’s skills and performance. This practice is one of the best methods to objectively assess workers at different levels.

• Skill assessment. Employees answer tests or quizzes to identify their capabilities and gaps quickly.  

• Certification. A method to assess certain skill levels to provide a more competitive edge on future projects. Certification helps leaders and HR teams to select the best employees for specific tasks. 

5. Get Insight from Visualization

Although visualization is optional, you can quickly extract valuable insights from it. In MS Excel, you can create tables and graphs that provide easily digestible data to decide on current and future projects. 

You can use a grading of colors or figures of different sizes to determine each employee's level of skills and competencies. The idea is to check what abilities needed are crucial to improve and which must be developed. 

A skills matrix helps HR managers and other incumbents easily assess skills since they can allocate assignments, identify gaps and competencies, and a single and actionable document. Below we share three useful templates to perform reviews and further make decisions about the payroll.

Free Skills Matrix Template

Download it from Citoolkit.

This free skills matrix template corresponds to a blank document you can use to assess any skills you consider relevant to your business. Since we know a crucial skill set may change from company to company, this versatile document will help you keep skills listed in a simple and elegant template. This file also integrates a grading system from 0 –Cannot perform– to 4 –Help others to perform. You can utilize this grading scale or create your own – it’s up to you. Thanks to this file, your business will gain valuable insights into leading skills for a particular project. 

Competency Matrix Template

Download it from Skilltree.at.

This spreadsheet template contains three different layouts to evaluate roles, skills, and gaps for current and future planning. The first is to ratify crucial skills for company positions and hire suitable candidates. In the second, you evaluate the staff and their competencies. The third is to analyze lacking skills and to definethe training requirements. The template incorporates gradation from 0 to 4.

Rating system:

• 0 Not necessary.

• 1 Should have a basic knowledge.

• 2 Should do it with support.

• 3 Should know and do it independently.

• 4 Should be good in theory and practice and can train.

Health and Safety Training Matrix Template

Download it from Smartsheet.

Contrary to the previous templates, this document corresponds to a training matrix providing a full health and safety training program overview. This file is perfect for filtering the results of your entire organization by trainee, department, position, completion status, and other criteria. Besides, although this template focuses on health and safety training, you can modify and use this free template for the purposes you consider relevant.

A completed skills matrix will give your organization valuable information and insights to build more productive teams and hire suitable employees. Correcting any skill gap you find will help your team members to address better critical tasks, eventually improving efficiency and productivity.

We invite you to immerse yourself in the potentialities of a skills matrix to clearly understand your employee’s abilities and plan strategies to improve lacks. This way, you avoid common mistakes in the hiring process and building large teams within your company.