Why use Skills?
Instead of allocating resources primarily by role, consider using skills-based assignments to optimize your team's potential. While roles provide a useful starting point, using skills can unlock greater efficiency across your entire team.
Using skills-based allocation can:
Drive efficiency
by enabling team members from different roles and departments to contribute to projects where they might have previously been overlooked.
Generate cost savings
by leveraging existing team members with availability instead of hiring contractors or new employees.
Help deliver projects on time
by ensuring team members have the right skill sets for their assignments, preventing delays caused by mid-project reassignments and skill mismatches.
Improve employee motivation
by assigning resources to projects that align with their professional competencies, preventing the frustration and struggle that comes from skill mismatches in work assignments.
Step 1: Building a Skills Inventory from Scratch
A common mistake when implementing a company-wide skills matrix is starting with a comprehensive skills inventory of all employees to establish the organization's skills taxonomy.
This approach often results in thousands of skills with significant redundancies, creating an overly complex system that becomes difficult to manage and maintain.
In Runn, the average number of skills per employee is 5.
Instead, follow these best practices:
1. Define what constitutes a skill
Establish a clear, easy-to-understand definition since HR team members will typically maintain and update the system when new employees or contractors join.
Without a precise definition, you risk adding unrelated items like education, seniority, or certifications (these can be included separately as custom fields).
2. Establish definitions of Skill Levels
Runn adopts a numerical scale of 0-4. Define the descriptive terms (beginner, intermediate, advanced) for each skill level, and ensure all stakeholders share an understanding of how each level maps to a person's competency.
3. Identify project-critical roles
List all roles essential for project delivery within each business unit or department.
Initially exclude non-project roles—you can add them later.
Focus first on the skills needed for successful project execution.
4. Map skills to roles
Using your identified roles as categories, list the specific skills each role requires.
Job descriptions and resumes can provide guidance, but focus on skills directly related to project delivery, and keep them specific rather than generic.
Step 2: Refine the Skill Names and List
Be specific with Skill Names
Instead of generic terms like "Communication skills," specify what's needed for project delivery (e.g., "Digital marketing"). For technical skills, avoid broad categories; use "PostgreSQL" or "MySQL" rather than just "SQL."
Limit to 5-8 essential skills per role
Skip obvious skills and focus on those where competency level directly impacts project success. For instance, many roles beyond project managers require project management skills; the key is understanding their expertise level.
Finalize the list of skills
This list may end up being very long! Once you've completed the list of skills for each role and department:
Standardize language across all entries.
Eliminate duplicates by renaming similar skills; combine "UI Design," "UX Design," and "User Experience Interface Design & Research" into "UI/UX R&D."
Expect department-specific skills to expand usage as other teams discover relevant applications.
Create a master skills list while maintaining role associations in your spreadsheet.
Validate with stakeholders - get feedback from HR, department heads, and people managers before finalizing.
Examples
Role Name | Skills required for the Role |
Project Manager | Problem Solving |
| Agile/ Scrum |
| Budget Management |
| JIRA |
Front End Engineer | CSS Grid |
| Vue.js |
| JIRA |
| Progressive Web Apps |
Graphic Designer | Figma/Canva |
| Typography |
| Presentation Skills |
| AR/VR Application Design |
FAQ: How do I set up Skill hierarchies or categorize skills in Runn?
FAQ: How do I set up Skill hierarchies or categorize skills in Runn?
If you have a large organization and hundreds of skills, consider prefixing the skill name with a Category, Role or Team to make searching easier. For example, if you have several coding skills, you can have skills as below:
Role Name | Skills required for the Role |
Project Manager | PM- Problem Solving |
| PM- Agile/ Scrum |
| PM- Budget Management |
| PM- JIRA |
Front End Engineer | Front End- CSS Grid |
| Front End- Vue.js |
| Front End- JIRA |
| Front End- Progressive Web Apps |
Graphic Designer | Comms- Figma/Canva |
| Comms- Typography |
| Comms- Presentation Skills |
| Comms- AR/VR Application Design |
Step 3: Define the Skills of your staff
Typically, the People Manager (or Team Lead) should provide and validate the skills of the people they manage. If you don't have a chance to check with them, add the skill name (without Skill Level) you mapped to each role to people in that Default Role.
Although competency level is important for upskilling & properly assessing how long an assignment will take, you can add it later.
Step 4: Ongoing Data Governance
Resources should not edit their skills on their own.
The People Manager (or Team Lead) or HR should review and update their team's skill levels periodically.