How Do You Build An IT Skills Matrix?

As the manager of a technical team, you’re likely experiencing the impact of the digital skills gap. Top talent is scarce while many employees and potential candidates don’t have the skills necessary to implement new technology like Cloud Computing or AI.

Simultaneously, there is a greater pressure on IT teams to deliver projects better and faster than ever before.

How do you combat these growing pressures?

It’s never been more critical for managers to have a clear vision of their team’s capabilities. With IT systems becoming more intertwined, gaps in skill sets threaten the overall performance of your team and its ability to deliver on time and on budget.

With a bird’s eye view of your team’s skills, you can attract, retain, and train your talent to build your highest performing team yet.

Why You Should Develop An IT Skills Matrix

What exactly is a skills matrix? As an official definition, a “skills matrix is a visual tool that shows the tasks and skills required for specific roles and the current competency and skill level of each employee for each task.”

A skills matrix is the foundation of your talent management strategy. Without this tool, its difficult to get that wide-scope vision of your team’s capabilities, identify gaps, develop growth plans, and ultimately build an effective strategy.

Developing a skills matrix is a worthwhile exercise for all managers in any field to conduct on a regular basis. Some fields, like IT, warrant a more frequent schedule due to the rapidly changing landscape of the industry.

If you’re ready to make the investment, follow the steps below to build your own IT skills matrix.

Step 1 | Define your roles, required skills, and proficiencies

Before you open that excel sheet and start plugging in numbers, you must answer these 3 questions:

What are the roles on my team?
What skills do these roles require?
What level of proficiency should my employees have in each of these skills?

These questions will help us set our goals and define our ideal team. This is the benchmark. Where are we now compared to where we need to be?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you can start collecting data.

Step 2 | Collect Data From Multiple Perspectives

After you’ve defined your roles, skills, and proficiencies it’s time to collect the data. The approach you take will depend on the type of skill you are collecting data for hard skills or soft skills.

Hard skills are more concretely defined such as coding languages or database management. You can use tests, certificates, education, and resumes to collect data on hard skills.

Soft skills, such as communication and collaboration, are harder to define and therefore more difficult to measure. Nevertheless, soft skills are some of the most important skills your employees can learn. To collect data on soft skills, conduct surveys that leverage multiple perspectives. For example, if you have an employee fill out a survey on their own proficiencies, also have a manager fill out the survey for that employee. Multiple perspectives will help eliminate implicit bias and differences can expose valuable insights.

Once you’ve collected your data, you’re ready to build your skills matrix. The type of skills matrix or matrices you choose to build depends on how you plan to leverage the results.

Step 3 | Choose And Build Your Skills Matrix (Or Matrices)

There are many different ways to develop your skills matrix. It all depends on what key question you are trying to answer. Here are some examples.

The Individual Skills Matrix

In this scenario, the Individual Skills Matrix allows you to compare a single employee’s current skill set and proficiencies to the ideal state of skills and proficiencies as previously defined for their role.

This type of skills matrix can help you identify gaps in an individual’s skill set. Or it can help you identify an individual’s strengths. You can use these insights to:

Develop customized training plans to improve individual skill sets
Assign a project leader based on strengths identified in your skills matrix
Conduct more effective performance reviews that actually help your employees grow

The Role Skills Matrix

This type of skills matrix is ideal for people with multiple employees in the same role. For example, you may have a team of data engineers or IT project managers. Using the skills matrix, you can identify and compare current skill sets across the group.

Are there single points of weakness?
Are there big gaps across this entire role?
What are the strengths of your team as a whole? Where could they improve?

The role skills matrix can help you answer these questions and develop a plan to address the gaps.

The Project Skills Matrix

This type of skills matrix allows you to look at a specific project and build a high-performing team of complementary skills using a data-driven approach. First, plug in the roles, skills, and proficiencies necessary for the project. Second, compare team members’ individual skills matrix to the needs of the project. Whose current skill set fits best and in what role do they belong?

The project skills matrix is more time-consuming but will help you…

Eliminate any guessing when it comes to choosing your project team
Justify your decisions with real data
Elevate your team’s performance before the project even starts

The Team Skills Matrix

This type of skills matrix gives you that true birds-eye-view of your IT team. Instead of looking at individual proficiencies, you are evaluating the team’s collective proficiency in each skill.

The team skills matrix is designed to help you…

Identify any skill gaps in your team’s overall skillset
Bid (and win!) projects that fit best with your team’s current skillset
Allocate recruiting and training resources towards areas that will see the greatest ROI

Step 4 | Evaluate The Gaps and Develop a Plan

Now that you’ve built your skills matrix, the final step is to evaluate the data and develop an action plan. Depending on the question you chose to answer, insights from your skills matrix can inform your decision-making in a number of ways.

No matter what your action plan will look like, always identify the gaps between current capabilities and ideal capabilities. One way to visually call out gaps is through color-coding your matrix.

Another way is to leverage data visualizations. For example, a double bar chart can easily depict gaps for a team skills matrix.

However you choose to define them, the skills gaps will inform the next steps you should take whether that means more recruiting, training programs, or shuffling teams.

BONUS! Create a Dynamic Skills Matrix for Better Insights

In the rapidly changing world of technology, it’s important to have a clear view of your team’s capabilities at all times. Why? When things are shifting rapidly, you want to stay ahead of the changes so your team’s performance does not suffer during transformations.

Let’s look at this another way. Continuous delivery has become an integral part of DevOps practices. The idea is to stay ahead of users’ needs with new features, constantly test for issues, and deliver faster without sacrificing the performance of the product. In product development, the goal is to always stay proactive. Reactive development leads to technical debt, poor performance, and a negative bottom line.

The concept is no different for the people delivering those products. Managers need to ensure they are proactively upskilling their talent to meet the requirements of a rapidly changing technical landscape.

Investing in a dynamic skills matrix tool enables managers to maintain a proactive talent management strategy without the time-consuming burden of developing a static skills matrix. A tool like this automates the process above and generates immediate insights so you can spend more time developing your action plan and building your best team yet.

Want to adopt an automated, dynamic skills matrix? You’re in the right place.

Learn how Visual Workforce helps you automate the discovery and optimization of the skills of your people, teams, and projects through automated, dynamic skills matrices.

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