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#62 - What is Skill Matrix? I - Definition

Author face
Article written by
Juan Jesús Millo

What is skill matrix and competency mapping?

I want to make a new series of articles talking about skill mapping, since I will be finishing my training in interaction in a relatively short time and, what do I do next? Well, here is the skill mapping tool.

The objective of this mapping is to know ourselves at a professional level, knowing what our strengths and weaknesses are, so that we can attack the skills that we see more uncompensated. The good thing about this technique is that it can be applied to any field outside of design.

Besides being able to be performed at an individual level, corporations with a high level of design maturity use these mappings to visualize the skillset of the designers of the team and thus know the weak points of the team and focus learning efforts on alleviating these weaknesses or hiring profiles with a high level in this gap.

They usually have various forms, either in grids or radial graph forms. These always have a scale, with the lowest number being the lack of knowledge of the topic, and the highest number being the complete expertise.

The depth of these mappings is up to us to decide; we can divide our expertise so roughly into the three big blocks of visual, interaction and research or dissect it by adding information architecture, strategy, prototyping, quali, quanti, leadership, etc...

And of course, these categories can be used as a clean category and rate each skill on a numerical scale as I said, or further dissect and divide this skills into even more, being for example:

Skills Matrix Design Methodologies

  • User Centered Design
  • Design Thinking
  • Design Sprint
  • Lean UX
  • Scrum & Kanban inside Design

Here we would start rating our daughter skills from 1 to 10 (for example) and it would give us a much more complete map of our skillset.

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