Skills & Competency Matrix

What this tool does

CM8-231 is a working skills and competency matrix. You record one row per person per skill — the proficiency they have today on a 0–4 scale, the level their role requires, whether the skill is critical to operations — and the tool shows you the two things a matrix exists to show: where people fall short of what their role needs, and which skills would stop the operation if one particular person did not come in tomorrow. Gaps get a development action, an owner of sorts (the assessor), a target date and a status, and the whole thing prints as a single report.

Every quality, safety and customer audit asks for a skills matrix, and for a good reason: it is the only document that answers "how do you know the person doing this work is competent to do it?" in one page. Auditors aside, it is the fastest way to plan cover for holidays, decide who trains the next intake, and make the case for a training budget with numbers instead of adjectives.

Everything runs inside this single file. There is no account, no upload and no network request of any kind, so assessments of named individuals — which is sensitive personal information — never leave the computer you are using.

The 0–4 proficiency scale

The scale only works if every level is an observable behaviour, not a feeling. "Pretty good at welding" is a self-rating; "produced three consecutive production welds that passed inspection without rework" is evidence. Use these anchors, and put them in front of every assessor:

• Level — Name — What you would actually observe
• 0 — No capability — Has not done the task. Cannot be left with it under any supervision arrangement.
• 1 — In training — Does the task correctly with someone watching. Output is checked before it is used. Not counted for cover or capacity.
• 2 — Competent — Does the routine task alone to the required standard, at the required pace, without being checked. Escalates anything unusual.
• 3 — Skilled — Handles the exceptions — the odd job, the fault, the nonstandard setup — without escalating. The person you send when it goes wrong.
• 4 — Expert — Everything at level 3, plus demonstrably brings others up: has trained someone to level 2 or beyond, writes or corrects the method.

Two boundaries do the most work. The 1→2 boundary is supervision: the moment output no longer needs checking, the person is a 2, and not a minute before. The 2→3 boundary is exceptions: plenty of reliable, valuable people are 2s for years, and that is fine — a role that only ever meets routine work only needs 2s. Resist grade inflation at 3→4: "very good at the job" is a 3. A 4 has evidence of making other people better, which is why the trainer-capable tick normally belongs on level 4 rows (the tool queries it below level 3).

Current versus required

The matrix scores every row twice, in effect: the level the person has and the level the role needs. The gap between them — not the raw level — is what drives everything else. A level 2 in a role that requires 2 is fully compliant; a level 3 in a role that requires 4 is a gap.

Set required levels per role, not per person, and set them honestly:

• Required 2 is the normal setting for a skill the role uses routinely.
• Required 3 is for roles that must cope alone with exceptions — a shift lead, a lone worker, the only inspector on nights.
• Required 4 is rare: reserve it for roles that exist to train others.
• Required 0 means the skill is not required for this role. The row still records the capability — useful for cover planning — but it does not count in the coverage figure.

If everyone is required to be a 4 at everything, the requirement means nothing and the coverage figure is fiction. A requirement is a bar the role genuinely has to clear.

The two risks the charts expose

Coverage gaps — the first chart. For each skill, how many of the people required to have it actually meet the bar? This is the audit question and the compliance question. It hurts slowly: a gap of one on a five-person skill is absorbed until the week two people are on leave.

Single points of failure — the second chart, and the one that hurts on a Tuesday. A skill where exactly one person is at level 3 or above is one resignation, one illness, one holiday, one argument away from being a skill your organisation does not have. Coverage gaps announce themselves in audits and reviews with time to respond; a single point of failure announces itself at 07:30 on an ordinary morning when the one person who can program the measuring machine phones in sick and the day's first-offs queue up behind an empty chair. The chart sorts skills by how many capable people stand behind each one and names the names while the list is short — if a bar is red and the skill is ticked as critical to operations, that row is your most urgent development action, ahead of any coverage gap.

The fix for a single point of failure is not to make the expert work harder; it is the deliberate, scheduled transfer of capability — pairing, shadowing, documented methods — with the expert's trainer capability recognised and time set aside for it.

Running assessments

Who assesses: someone who has seen the person do the work and is at least one level above them in the skill — usually the supervisor or the designated trainer. Never self-assessment alone: people are poor judges of their own level in both directions, and the confident 1 is more dangerous than the modest 3.

How often: assess on joining, after any development action completes, and on a routine cycle — annually is common, six-monthly where the work or the people change quickly. Record the assessment date on every row and set the status to Reassessment due when a row goes stale; a matrix full of three-year-old assessments is a historical document, not a plan.

Calibration: two assessors using the same words will still score differently until they compare. Once or twice a year, have assessors jointly score a few people they both know, argue out the differences against the behavioural anchors, and adjust. Uncalibrated scores make the cross-team charts meaningless — team A's tough marker will always look worse than team B's kind one.

Development planning

A gap without an action is a fact; a gap with an action, a target date and a status is a plan. The discipline is simple and the development plan table enforces most of it:

• Every gap of 2 or more gets a written development action with a target date. Gaps that size do not close by osmosis.
• Actions describe doing, with evidence: "complete two setups under observation with the first-off signed off" closes a gap; "improve CNC skills" does not.
• The action is only complete when the person is reassessed and the row's level actually moves. Attending a course is an input; the new level is the output.
• Overdue targets are reviewed, not silently rolled forward. If the date moves twice, the plan was never real — decide whether the gap matters, and either resource it or accept it in writing.

Skills matrix versus training matrix

They sound alike and answer different questions. A training matrix records courses, certificates and licences — who holds which qualification, when it was issued, when it expires, and whether the legally required training is in date. Its currency is documents and dates. A skills matrix — this tool — records demonstrated proficiency against what the role needs. Its currency is observed behaviour. The two disagree constantly, and both are right: a person can hold a valid forklift certificate and still drive badly (trained, not competent), and a veteran can be the best welder on site with an expired ticket (competent, not currently certified). You need both documents. Keep certificates, expiry dates and renewal compliance in the separate training register tool, and keep proficiency, coverage and succession here — a cell in this matrix should never be used as evidence that a legally required certificate exists.

The formulas

Rows with a required level of 0 are excluded from coverage entirely — they carry information, not obligation. A negative gap means the person exceeds the requirement, which is capacity you can lend to cover and training. The single-point-of-failure count is the number of skills where exactly one person sits at level 3 or above; a skill where nobody is at 3+ is worse still, and shows as a red zero-length bar at the top of the depth chart.

FAQ

How many skills should the matrix hold? The ones that would appear in a handover document or an audit — typically five to fifteen per team. If a skill would never stop work or fail an audit by being absent, it probably does not need a row.

Should everyone be assessed on every skill? No. Add a row where the role requires the skill, or where the person genuinely has it and it is worth knowing for cover. A matrix padded with 0-required, 0-level rows is noise.

What if someone disagrees with their score? Good — that conversation is the point. Take the behavioural anchor for the disputed level and ask for the evidence: the unsupervised output, the exception handled, the person trained. Either the evidence exists and the score moves, or it does not and the development action writes itself.

Can I use half levels? Resist it. The scale's value is its coarseness — five levels with hard behavioural boundaries produce arguments that settle; ten produce arguments that do not.

One person appears twice for the same skill. Keep one row per person per skill and update it on reassessment. If duplicates do creep in, the matrix table uses the most recent assessment date, but the tiles and charts count rows — so clean them up.

Saving your work

Assessments, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window, a second machine or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the register for spreadsheet work. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo. A skills matrix is an assessment of named individuals — treat exports as confidential personnel information.

Accuracy & disclaimer

The arithmetic here is simple and the tool does it faithfully. Everything that matters sits underneath it: whether the levels reflect observed behaviour or optimism, whether assessors are calibrated, and whether the assessments are recent enough to mean anything. The matrix records capability; it does not create it, and it is not evidence of formal qualification — certificates and licences with expiry dates belong in a training register kept to your local requirements. Nothing here is legal or employment advice.