Transform A Business Skills Matrix to Track your Professional Goals

Typically, a skills matrix is a tool used by leaders to identify their team’s skills and assign tasks based on knowledge and experience. One matrix can conveniently chart where each team member excels and struggles.

Skills Matrices are for more than just rating an employee’s competence. Companies can use data from a Skills Matrix to make pertinent decisions such as initiating a hiring campaign and overhauling their training and development process.

Training & Development: 
Five Goals of a Skills Matrix
1. Creates Awareness: Help Individuals on the team see their strengths
2. Outlines Expectations: Team members learn what skills are effective
3. Indicates Hiring Needs: Determine what skills are missing from each team and plan to add more members
4. Identifies team's weak areas: Teams are empowered to collaborate and plan for operating with the current set of skills.
5. Highlights development needs: Overall, the organization learns where it needs training and development improvement

A traditional skills matrix can be transformed for an individual who is looking to change careers or jobs, apply for a promotion, or just maintain a record of their knowledge and experience. Your professional skills matrix should include a mixture of soft and hard skills that you have acquired and those that you wish to achieve.

For instance, you may be a skilled problem solver and an expert at communicating via email. However, you may notice that in addition to those soft skills, you need to improve your emotional intelligence. You may be proficient with hard skills such as the software suites you use regularly and want to learn Spanish and ASL.

After you filled out all of the Skills you have, want to improve, and what to gain, rank them honestly. This ranking system can be as marking an x or checkmark in columns signifying strengths and weakness or more involved.

Skills Matrix
SkillStrengthNeeds ImprovementLimitations
Problem SolvingX 
OrganizationX 
LeadershipX 
Critical ThinkingX 
Verbal CommunicationX 
Emotional IntelligenceX 
Microsoft Software SuiteX 
Adobe Software SuiteX 
Google Software SuiteX 
Storage Systems & ManagementX 
Marketing Campaign ManagementX 
Language – EnglishX 
Language – SpanishX 
Language – ASL Xexp: course avaialability
example of a skills matrix

Download our examples and use them as a guide to create your own:

PMPHASE Skills Matrix