Skill Mapping

How to maximize and utilize your team skills

by Nicolás Testa

INTRODUCTION

The evolution of skills is top of mind for professionals in every industry. Adapting to rapid change has become not only a business imperative but also a demand that motivates learning and development strategies. 

Hierarchical structures with job levels based on expertise are no longer what makes an organization successful. Instead, we’ll see the rise of agile, team-oriented networks where individuals come together, share their knowledge and collaborate to solve problems before moving onto a new project, task or group.

These transformations bring with them several critical questions: How do you go from the skills your organization has now to the skills it will need down the road? How do you even know what those essential skills are? One powerful tool is skills mapping.

“Visualized data can tell better stories about individuals, teams and organizations than plain numbers or text”.

It’s not uncommon for leaders in quickly growing companies and departments to rely on certain people for certain things. While that’s helpful much of the time, it can lead to problems: an overdependence on some people, and underutilization of others.

To retain these highly skilled people, organizations need to make sure that these individuals are motivated enough by the tasks assigned to them.

But organizations can only do this if they understand each individual’s unique skills and abilities and what skills these individuals are the most interested in deploying and allocate work accordingly.

2. WHERE ARE YOU STANDING? THE CHALLENGES

Before your organization can begin its transformation with skills mapping, it’s important to understand that there are two sides to every skill mapping story. On one side, you have skills needed, an approach that centers on outlining areas of growth to help you attain specific goals and providing your employees with paths they can follow to realizing them and, at the same time, develop their own careers.

On the other side, you have skills achieved, where organizations identify subject matter experts (SMEs) and map existing skills. This approach enables them to leverage SMEs’ knowledge when organizing teams; make it easier for individuals to find out whom they should reach out to for support in a specific area; and allow stakeholders — managers, mentors and others — to design skills maintenance plans.

Two key challenges to address:

• Finding alignment between the company and team needs.

Where are the team strengths and weaknesses? How to upskill my team in something meaningful for them and for the company strategy?

• Keeping the team engaged and motivated.

The digital industry is incredibly competitive. It’s very hard to find great talents, so how can we nurture the one we have and make them stay?

When I started drafting this POV I had four specific questions that I wanted to respond when mapping my team:

1. Who’s expert at what?
2. Who’s conversant in particular skills/topics, but not necessarily an expert
3. Who has no skills in one area, but wants to learn more?
4. And finally: who has no skills in an area, and has zero interest in learning more?

So in order to get some answers, I’ve started to look for new ways to understand better the relevance of conducting and designing team skill matrix.

3. WHAT IS A SKILL MATRIX AND WHY BUILD ONE? THE PURPOSE

A skills matrix is a visual tool that displays, in the form of a table, each individual’s level of competency in specific skills and their level of interest in utilizing those skills. Some skills matrices are basic, others granular, with a high level of detail.

Developing a traditional skills matrix is a valuable exercise for organizations because it helps managers understand whether the basic skills required for the job at hand are present in their teams and identify any gaps that can be detrimental to the organization’s work. For instance, if only a few employees possess the skills at the core of the organization’s work, they will bear the burden of doing a chunk of the work, which may harm the outcome.

A skills matrix also helps organizations to efficiently utilize existing skills by redistributing talent internally and plan for future recruitment.

For employees, a skills matrix that highlights their strengths and weaknesses can be a starting point for self-improvement.

Skill matrixes allow team leaders to pick the employees who have exactly the skill sets that are needed for each project. Teams are better prepared for projects because they are aware of the skills available. If a particular skill set is missing from the team, team leaders can look for employees with that skill elsewhere in the organization or recruit someone with those skills.

All this leads to efficient employee utilization. That’s not all. When employees are matched with projects that need their skills, the outcome is always good, leading to happy clients and employees.

Photo source: Personal Dashboard | Muchskills.com

?4. WHY IS IT SO RELEVANT? THE BENEFITS

Well known among companies that invest in people management, competency mapping is very important to establish the technical and behavioral skills essential to each position within the company. In addition, it is possible to identify the individual and collective skills that can be improved by the employees.

So, if your company wants to develop a successful team, the first step is to identify the “failures”. And then look at what can be improved in terms of skills. If necessary, it is also useful to invest in hiring people that can bring what is lacking inside. Thus, making the process of hiring more efficient or replacing professionals within the organization.

?“What organizations need is a simple design interface that can show them in one glance all they need to know about the skill sets in the organization.”

Understanding the mixture of skills and experience in your team is critical for any leader. Creating a Skills Matrix is valuable because it helps you:

• Identifying buddy-opportunities across the team. For those that felt they were lacking in a particular area, it was clearer than ever whom they could go to for advice, examples and coaching.
• Onboarding more effectively; for all of the above reasons, it’s a really useful way-marking tool for new-joiners into our team.
• Understand the current skills and experience that exists within your team
• Identify skill gaps, where there is a shortage of appropriate skills and experience
• Pinpoint high-risk areas where you are relying on a single person to complete critical tasks
• Plan the way forward when trying to introduce new skills or approaches to your
• Restructure your team to improve its effectiveness. Structuring development conversations.
• Interviewing more effectively. By structuring a set of questions to ask when interviewing internal and external candidates.

The best part is that a Skills Matrix is simple to create and maintain. It simply requires a little effort to understand the capabilities of your team. Keeping the Skills Matrix simple is key. Too much effort in maintaining the information in these types of tools can cause leaders to neglect them. Great complexity will introduce a tendency to let the information go out of date and become

Photo source: Accenture’s Skills and Insights Dashboard

5.   HOW CAN I CREATE ONE?

It’s not just easy for the group’s manager to know the division of skills within the group to assign resources; the Skill Matrix can also help improve the organization’s and the individual’s performance in several ways.

Developing the Skills Matrix and discussing its results with the employees helps them gain insight into their own competencies. It makes employees more aware of the skills that the team needs as a whole to deliver a strong performance. It also shows what they can contribute to do their job well, and where they’re still lacking. That’s a perfect starting point for learning and development opportunities.

The Skills Matrix is very suited as a tool to help understand the team as a whole. Because it offers quick insight into the skills that are present and lacking in a team, you can quickly recruit the right people. The group also becomes more aware of their individual weaknesses, leading to an open work environment where employees aren’t afraid to ask for help.

SKILLS MATRIX STEP-BY-STEP SUGGESTED PLAN

Photo credits: Toolshero

Step 1: Identify project competencies

Each project has different requirements regarding knowledge and skills. Define which aspects are important, which competencies are required, and which specific skills still need to be acquired. Divide these competencies and put them on the left side of the Skills Matrix.

Step 2: Identify individual competencies

Now interview all the members of the team or group. Discuss their skills, knowledge, and interests related to the project or task objectives. Explain that you’re looking for the right competencies for the job in order to link the right people to the right tasks.

Step 3: Establish employee interest

When establishing the individual competencies, it’s important to also determine whether employees would be interested in taking on a variety of responsibilities. Try to find out if a person isn’t interested in doing a certain task, so you can change the task to make it more interesting for them.

Step 4: Incorporate all data in the Skills Matrix

Collect all the information from the preparation phase of making the Skill Matrix and copy the data into the template.

Step 5: Respond to the results

Now go over each team member’s part of the Skills Matrix with them and determine a score while the tasks are carried out. Give all the employees a chance to add information or offer suggestions. This evaluation allows you to verify if the information is correct and if the right person has been linked to the right tasks. Make changes if the data shows that you haven’t put the right people on the right tasks. If an employee shows interest in developing themselves, try to make sure there are sufficient opportunities and support for this.

When generating your list of skills and experience items, be sure to include:

• Current skills: The skills that your team members use today to perform their duties.
• Future skills: Skills that your team will need in the future as you plan to adopt new approaches, methods or technologies.
• Current experiences: Current experiences include the context that a team member has worked within throughout their career. This may include industries, physical conditions or different types of work environments.
• Future experiences: Future experiences include experience that you feel may be useful for team members to obtain in the future to support new ways of working for your team.

6. CLOSING COMMENTS

To prepare for the modern world of business, organizations need to become increasingly agile to effectively adapt to quickly changing business conditions and embrace the demands of a more dynamic workforce. To that end, skills mapping can play a pivotal role.

Skills (or talent) mapping is a critical component of an agile organization. By linking talent management with strategic workforce planning, organizations can assess the current performance of employees to identify those that have high potential and match the skills that are available today to the skills and qualities that are needed to grow the business tomorrow. They can also quickly and easily form, disband, and reform teams to address the most pressing business challenges. The ability to move between teams without risk is a critical attribute of high-performing companies. 

“Skills mapping is not a one-time thing. This is particularly true today, where the business is continuously evolving and the half-life of a learned skill is now five years (or less). You must continually revisit the lists of desired skills and update them as needed. Without mapping the skills and evolvement of your employees, you can’t help them untap their true potential. Competency mapping is a surefire way to improve your human resources efforts”. 

Sources and links consulted:

• “A Better Way to Develop and Retain Top Talent” – Margaret Rogers @ Harvard Business Review
•  “Meeting the Demand for New Skills in the Workplace With Skills Mapping” – Kerri Monorek @ trainingindusty.com (August 2019)
•  “How to maximize and utilize your team skills” – Marc Decerle @ UX Collective on Medium
•  “Say goodbye to the skills matrix, a better way to visualize people’s skills is here” – Noel Braganza @ muchskill.com
•  “Why your team needs a Skills Matrix” – Ben Brearley @ Small Business Forum on Medium
• “Skills Matrix” – Ben Janse @ toolshero.com
• “The Pivotal Role Skills Mapping Plays in Creating More Agile Organizations” – Kerri Manorek @ d2l.com