Skill matrices can be a useful addition to an HR professional’s toolkit for assessing and developing employees' skills.
Especially in a world where companies are future-focused and prioritizing reskilling and upskilling, knowing how to craft and interpret a skill matrix can help the business’s bottom line by ensuring that the right employees are assigned to the right projects and that skill gaps are identified and addressed.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can play an important part in helping HR pros and leaders create skill matrices quickly and accurately and help extract better, more targeted insights – which can all cultivate better skill development.
Here’s how to create a skill matrix and utilize AI during the process.
What is a Skill Matrix?
Put simply, a skill matrix is a table that lays out the skills a team needs and which employees possess those skills and are proficient in them.
Organizations use skill matrices to track and measure the skill development of employees. The skills, organized in a matrix or table, are compared with the names or roles of different employees.
Typically, skills within the matrix include those relevant to a specified project or overall organization and the skills that employees already possess. Skills can vary from technical skills to soft skills to industry- or organization-specific skills. That way, organizational leaders can have a comprehensive view of where a team’s skillset is at the current moment versus where it needs to be to achieve a goal effectively.
While a skill matrix can help an organization achieve many things, the main purpose is to assess employees and identify skill gaps to help develop employees with a more targeted approach.
A skill matrix can be an essential part of an organizational effectiveness strategy. It ensures that tasks and projects are delegated to the right people and that employees possess the skills to help the organization meet its overall goals.
Skill Matrix vs. Competency Matrix
Skill matrices can sometimes be confused with competency matrices. Although they’re closely related concepts, there are some stark differences.
They mainly differentiate in their scope. While a skill matrix is job-specific and can be narrowed down to certain projects or tasks, a competency matrix covers a broader scope, including skills, behaviors, knowledge, and more, with a focus on job performance and career progression.
A competency matrix can be used to examine an individual’s comprehensive competencies more deeply, while skill matrices focus on pre-determined skills relevant to a specific project or role.
4 Steps To Build a Skill Matrix with AI
Here’s how to build a skill matrix – and how AI can help you with every step along the way.
1. Identify skills and set proficiency standards
Before beginning to craft a skill matrix, organizations must define the expectations and metrics being used to measure skills and proficiencies. Relevant skills to include in the matrix are dependent upon organizational and departmental needs but might include a mixture of skills that employees currently possess, as well as skills that are needed, either at the organizational level or for specific projects.
When defining skills, consider talking to stakeholders about core competencies or any skill gaps managers or leaders have noticed among teams. Skills should be future-focused to help predict and address organizational needs beyond their current state.
Along with relevant skills, it’s also important to establish guidelines regarding how employees’ skill proficiency will be measured. For example, will employees self-evaluate their skills? Will other performance evaluation techniques – such as skill tests or assessing the results of previous projects – be included in the evaluation?
Understanding and standardizing metrics and key performance indicators can help ensure that employees are evaluated fairly and the matrix will be accurate.
During this stage of the process, you can utilize AI in various ways, like:
Provide AI with organizational goals and project briefs to identify core skills that may be relevant to objectives
Ask AI to brainstorm relevant ways to measure employees’ proficiency in different areas
Use AI to identify any unintentional biases or errors in the skills and metrics you plan on using
2. Assess the skill levels of employees
The next step to create a skill matrix is to assess employees based on the criteria from the first step.
This may look different depending on what skills you’re measuring – and how you’re measuring them. For example, this process step may just involve gathering and analyzing historical data, such as previous performance reviews, self-evaluation scores, or project feedback. However, this step could also be more involved, such as including peer reviews or conducting feedback sessions.
When assessing employees, ensure that all information, like certifications or training records, is considered. To avoid subjectivity, lean into the hard numbers rather than anecdotal evidence of employee performance.
During this step, it’s also essential to come up with a fair, standard ranking system to rate employees’ proficiency. There are many different ways to measure proficiency. Still, many skill matrices use a five-point scale, with 0 being no experience in a skill, and 4 being advanced expertise in a skill or focus on levels from novice to expert.
When assessing employee skill levels, you can leverage AI to:
Interpret and analyze employee data to determine skill level
Pick out insights from previous performance evaluations or project feedback
Craft and personalize self-evaluations for employees to fill out to measure their skills
3. Build a matrix based on collected data
Once you have all of the data you need, you can begin populating the matrix with the given data and insights gleaned from previous steps. Each employee should have a proficiency level assigned for each skill on the matrix.
Building the matrix also requires you to determine what type of matrix you want to build, including how detailed it should be. A table is the most basic and common type of matrix, often built out in Excel or another spreadsheet program. Still, many performance management software platforms also have options for a more thorough matrix design.
As you build out the matrix, you may also want to add notes or any relevant context about certain employee skill levels. You may also want to indicate if an employee is interested in developing different skills that they may not be fully proficient in yet to help decide where to allocate resources.
During this stage, you can rely on AI to:
Classify and populate a matrix table with given skills and employee rankings
Automate adding new or updated data into the skill matrix after it has been created
4. Extract insights and continuously review
After the skill matrix has been created, it’s up to HR to extract insights from it and turn them into meaningful action that can help develop employee skills.
Using the skill matrix, HR and organizational leaders can easily identify skill gaps, develop a plan to address them, and use matrix information to make smarter decisions about hiring and promoting.
You can continuously refer to the insights and the matrix itself to make better-informed decisions, so it’s also important to keep it updated with employee skill development and shift skill priorities as organizational needs shift.
Here are some ways that AI can assist in the assessment of the matrix and continuous review:
Automatically extract insights based on the matrix, such as skill gaps
Personalize employee development plans based on the skill matrix
Benefits of Incorporating AI Into A Skill Matrix
A skill matrix can be a beneficial tool for virtually any company. It can help the organization map out the skills employees currently possess and then work to bridge the gap to develop the skills needed to achieve organizational goals.
There are many benefits to using a skill matrix, including:
Identify skill gaps: A skill matrix can assist an organization with identifying – and ultimately rectifying – skill gaps within a team.
Influence decision-making: A skill matrix can also be a helpful decision-making tool, and serve as a good reference when deciding on workforce needs, like hiring, promotions, or development programs.
Optimize L&D: Analyzing the skill matrix can help HR get a more comprehensive view of an employee’s skill set, making it easier to tailor L&D programs to specific employee needs.
Allocate resources: Understanding an employee’s skills – and opportunities to improve specific skills – can help organizations better allocate resources for employee development, like leadership development courses.
Establish a baseline: Skill matrices can help establish a baseline of where the organization is currently and then help track and measure how employee development initiatives impact the matrix.
However, like many other HR tools, building, assessing, and updating a skill matrix can be time-consuming for HR professionals. By using AI to build and assess a skill matrix, HR professionals can ensure that they spend their time coming up with meaningful initiatives and goals instead of inputting data and interpreting results.
Here are some ways that AI can help improve and enhance a skill matrix:
Automation: AI can automate certain parts of the skill matrix-building process, like inputting employee data.
Skill mapping: Instead of spending time manually mapping skills, AI can populate a skill map within minutes.
Personalization: With its enhanced analysis capabilities, AI can help personalize development plans based on the skill matrix.
Predictive analysis: AI can do wonders to predict future needs and insights based on historical data, which can help identify skills to include on the matrix.
Objectivity: AI can help ensure that employee assessments are objective and remove human bias from the data-gathering process.
HR’s Action Plan to Implement Changes
Building a skill matrix is just one part of the puzzle. The value of a skill matrix comes after it’s been analyzed. HR can utilize data from the matrix to help make more informed decisions and implement changes that can help boost employee development and build a stronger organization.
Here’s a quick action plan to turn data from a skill matrix into valuable action.
Find patterns: Look for patterns within the matrix to identify areas the organization can focus on, especially prominent skill gaps within different teams or across departments.
Ask for employee input: Before implementing any changes to development or skilling efforts, ask employees about any feedback or thoughts on their spot within the matrix to understand any nuance you may have missed or identify any boosted interest in specific areas.
Target future-focused skills: In the age of upskilling, consider focusing on skills that the organization needs to stay adaptable and resilient into the future, such as skills in emerging technology.
Key Insights
Skill matrices are an effective way to measure individual employees’ skills and compare them to the broader organization. Although the result is relatively simple—a table measuring proficiency in a group of relevant skills—AI can help make the process easier, more efficient, and more targeted to employee needs.
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