10 Practices for Building a Learning Organization: the Skill Matrix

The 10 Practices of Intré’s Learning Organization

Intré’s evolving Learning Organization model is centered on skills development and the professional growth of its employees. It fosters a collaborative learning environment through targeted initiatives, encouraging both individual and collective engagement to ensure continuous learning and active participation across the organization. Intré’s current learning initiative is built on ten key practices:

1. Guilds
2. Camp
3. Communities
4. Skill Matrix
5. Certifications
6. Academy
7. CoP I Wanna Be A Speaker
8. Learning Objectives
9. Classroom Training
10. Language Courses

What exactly is a Skill Matrix? What does it look like in practice? And how does it fit into Intré’s Learning Organization model? These are the questions I’ll answer in the following paragraphs.

A Definition of Skill Matrix

The Skill Matrix is a method used to map the competencies—both hard and soft skills—of individuals within an organization. Originally developed in the economic field, this technique was designed to provide management with a clear overview of employees’ strengths and areas for improvement. It helps answer a key operational question: “We have specific needs for a given task—who can we rely on within the company?”

What the Skill Matrix Is All About

In its basic form, the skill matrix is structured as a grid: rows represent skills, columns represent team members, and each cell contains a confidence level — essentially, “how strong you feel” about a particular skill.

Team members are responsible for filling out the matrix through self-assessment. They can also choose the scale to use, both in terms of range and meaning. For example, on a scale from 0 to 5, a 0 might mean “I have no experience with this skill,” while a 5 could mean “People come to me for advice, I’ve taught courses on it, and I’d be happy to do it again.”

It’s worth noting that, beyond individual self-assessment, the skill matrix values are reviewed within the team to help identify and correct cognitive biases — such as impostor syndrome or overconfidence (Dunning–Kruger effect).

Skill Matrix in Our Learning Organization Model

One of the key concepts behind the Learning Organization model is personal mastery, one of the five disciplines introduced by Peter Senge (founder of the “Society for Organizational Learning”, an organization that fosters the exchange of ideas among large companies to support the development of Learning Organizations):

Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively.
As such, it is an essential cornerstone of the learning organization – the learning organization’s spiritual foundation.

When someone underrates their own skill—especially one that could actually be valuable to the project they’re working on—it creates an opportunity for both personal and team growth.
The same applies when a team member openly acknowledges a gap in their understanding of a specific procedure or workflow: they can raise the issue with the team, which can then organize support or create room for skill development.
These behaviors foster group self-awareness around how skills are distributed and, more importantly, help build a shared vision of the product itself—reducing biases in the process.

Skill Matrix: Its Journey at Intré

Intré didn’t adopt the Skill Matrix in a rigid or finalized way from the start. The process began six years ago with dedicated sessions involving a few “pilot” teams. These teams were asked to map both hard and soft skills in relation to the product they were developing. It quickly became clear that the most knowledgeable people in one area often lacked expertise in others. Rather than continuing with highly specialized individuals (I-shaped skills), it became evident that it would be more beneficial for the team — and therefore the company — to have professionals with deep expertise in a specific area, combined with a broad base of general knowledge that allows them to be flexible and adaptable (T-shaped skills).
To monitor how skills evolved over time, teams held retrospectives or recurring meetings aimed at identifying improvement actions — for instance, working sessions based on Pair Programming.

The tool proved useful and its value was recognized, but it became clear that it needed to be structured at a company-wide level in order to achieve broader adoption and offer a cross-team perspective.

Skill Matrix to Embrace Change

Around three years ago, we decided to standardize the process, making skill mapping a systematic practice across all Intré teams. This gave the company an additional tool to respond to change: depending on the needs of a client project, forming new groups and rotating people across teams became easier and more effective.

How do we do it?
Every six months, we organize sessions with each team, giving individuals the freedom to discuss, revise, and complete an Excel spreadsheet that contains the Skill Matrix framework — a base set of skills and one column for each team member.
The session is divided into three main phases:

1. Skill Matrix customization: based on project-specific needs, relevant hard and soft skills are added. Skills deemed irrelevant or redundant may also be removed or grouped for simplicity.
2. Self-assessment: each team member rates themselves in every cell that intersects a skill and a person, using a six-level scale.
3. Internal discussion (often held alongside self-assessment): the team discusses the ratings to reach a shared understanding.

The data collected in the Skill Matrix is then imported into an internal tool, which provides metrics, reports, and statistics accessible to management at any time.

Skill Matrix: Evolution and Future Developments

Over the past six months, two groups have been involved in testing and improving the tool further.
It became clear that outside the specific session context, teams tend not to benefit from the Skill Matrix in a meaningful or lasting way—at least not in proportion to the effort required to keep it updated.
So the tool needed to evolve—but how?

Evolution

The first experiment aimed to establish a stronger link between the topics identified as relevant and each individual’s growth plan.
Monthly sessions were introduced (naturally shorter than the biannual ones), with the clear goal of defining specific training actions during each iteration—actions that would be personally meaningful but also have a measurable positive impact on the group.
This approach helped team members create a virtuous cycle, making the Skill Matrix more effectively integrated into everyday practices.

In the near future, we’ll continue taking steps to make the Skill Matrix easier to use and more immediately valuable. This includes developing new resources and tools that are better aligned with day-to-day workflows and more seamlessly integrated into our practices.

Resources

• A. C. Edmondson, “Teaming: How organizations learn, innovate, and compete in the knowledge economy“ – John Wiley & Sons, 2012
• L. Argote, “Organizational Learning: Creating, Retaining and Transferring Knowledge“ – Springer Science & Business Media, 2012
• J. Katzenbach and D. Smith, “The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization” – Harvard Business Review Press, 2015
• D. C. McClelland, “Testing for Competence Rather Than for ‘Intelligence’” – *American Psychologist*, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 1–14, 1973
• R. E. Boyatzis, “Competencies in the 21st Century” – *Journal of Management Development*, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 5–12
• L. M. Spencer and S. M. Spencer, “Competence at Work: Models for Superior Performance” – John Wiley & Sons, 1993