What ?

A skills matrix is a grid or table that clearly and visibly illustrates the skills and competence held by individuals within a team. The aim is to help team members understand each other’s skills, abilities and ambitions.

Why ?

Skills matrix will help you to answer those questions:

• Which competences, skills and abilities are already in the team ?
• Which competencies, skills, and abilities do you possess that may not be relevant to the goal of the team ?
• Which competences and so forth would you like to achieve or learn from some of the other team members ?

Once you have answers to those questions you can :

• Define how to share people’s knowledge
• Identify what are the missing skills that are needed to reach the goal of the team
• Measure the skills improvement of the team

How ?

• Schedule a skills matrix meeting
  • Prepare you to facilitate the meeting
  • Gather your team
  • Facilitate the meeting
  • Debrief
• Structure the result/skills matrix (in Excel for example)
• Communicate it
• Define a training strategy based on it

Resources

• Facilitator’s guide
• Team Lift Off with Market of Skills and Competence Matrix