Every company wants better-skilled employees. Everyone wants to develop production plant personnel with the highest skills and competency standard that allows us to face the challenges of excellence, complete in all the aspects. A skills matrix is a crucial tool to do so.
What is a skills matrix?
The Skills Matrix is a visual tool that helps you to clearly see the skills and competencies of individuals within an organisation, group, or team. The Skills Matrix is part of skills management. The primary goal of skills management is to offer support for understanding, developing, utilising, and tracking people and their skills.
The matrix is generally used for small groups of people, but can be expanded. The left side shows specific skills or knowledge areas that are required for a specific project, for instance. Next, two variables have to be entered for every name: proficiency regarding the skill in question, and interest to use the skill.
If used correctly, the Skills Matrix offers a reliable overview of the knowledge and skills available within a team. It can tell you if you have the skills necessary to carry out specific tasks. If the team is lacking in certain necessary skills, we call this a skills gap. And a skills gap can be crossed with technology.
Benefits of building employee skills
Incentivizing the learning of new skills provides two major benefits to employees:
- Increased pay on each paycheck for every skill they learn.
- Improved ability to get into other jobs in the future because of their robust skills list.
- Skills redundancy in the workforce.
- Improved productivity from employees.
- Increased employee engagement and retention of skilled workers.
How to implement a skills matrix?
- Define the Skill Matrix (Skill, Level, and Target)
- Define the Training Schedule
- Communicate the Skill Matrix
- Managers Team
- Supervisors Team
- Line Operators and Mechanics
By making sure that there is a degree of skill redundancy in the workforce, you can become more flexible as a manufacturer, able to reassign personnel as needed to cover short-term demands without having to constantly add and subtract temporary laborers. Additionally, if an employee has to take a leave of absence, others can take his or her place with ease, preventing production bottlenecks.