"Skill Matrix: see who's strong where"

What the Skill Matrix is

The Skill Matrix is a read-only deck. It does not ask you to enter anything, run anything, or generate anything. It reads the competency ratings already sitting on your team's performance review records, the numeric scores a manager assigned per skill, and rolls them up into two things: a picture of where your crew is strong and weak as a group, and a ranked list of where each person stands. Nothing here is invented or estimated. If a member has no scored review on file, the matrix says so plainly instead of guessing.

This is an analyst-archetype deck, the same family as Performance and the depth chart: it looks at data you already have and surfaces the pattern. It is not a launchpad tool like Performance Reviews (you don't "run" a Skill Matrix), and it never leaves your account. Nothing it reads or shows feeds Verinode's peer benchmarks or the intelligence layer; it stays private to your team.

Where to find it

Open Team from the sidebar. The route is /team. In the Take Action row you'll see a tile labeled Skill Matrix with the subtitle "See who's strong where," sitting between Training Plan and Career Path among the row's other launchpad-style tiles (DISC, Performance Reviews, Training Plan, Skill Matrix, Career Path). It carries the same small pulsing Live badge every tile in that row uses, and its button reads Preview rather than "Start," since there's nothing to fill in. Click the tile to open the deck as a center overlay; your sidebar and the IQ panel stay in place behind it.

Because the deck only has one screen of content, it opens straight to that screen. There's no tab bar to click through, no menu to hunt in. One click in, everything is in view.

What feeds it, and what doesn't

The competency scores behind this deck live on your team's performance review records, alongside the review date, the manager's name, and any narrative notes. Today, those scores arrive one way: a performance review document that you forward by email or upload to Verinode, one that already contains structured, numeric ratings per skill, the kind of layout an HR system or a written review template produces (for example, a leadership score and a technical score sitting side by side on the page). Verinode's extraction reads those ratings off the document and matches the reviewed person to your active roster by name.

If a document doesn't name an active team member Verinode can match by name, or doesn't carry any numeric competency ratings, it simply doesn't contribute a row here. Only members currently on your active or seasonal roster show up at all; someone who has left or been offboarded drops off the matrix along with the rest of the roster.

The Analysis screen, top to bottom

Crew average

At the top sits a single panel with a headline number: Crew average, out of 5. That number is the mean of your team's strongest scored skills, drawn from whichever competencies your reviews have captured (things like Technical Work, Reliability, or Communication, whatever your review documents actually score, each one humanized from the raw rating name into a readable label). Beside the number, a line reads "Strongest: [skill name]", naming whichever competency has the single highest team-wide average.

Below the headline, a short list of bars breaks that average down by skill, strongest first: each row shows the skill's label, its average score written as X.X/5, and a bar sized to that score out of 5. A bar renders in Deere Green when the skill's average is 3.5 or higher, and in Ember Red when it sits below that. This is the same "strong versus needs attention" color language used across the rest of the platform: green means it's holding, red means it's worth a look.

By person

Underneath, a plain list titled By person runs one row per team member, separated by hairline dividers, no boxed table. Each row shows:

• The member's name, and beneath it their role as it's recorded on their profile.
• If they have a scored review on file, the role line adds "· strongest: [skill name]", naming their single best-rated competency.
• On the right, their overall average score as X.X/5, the mean across every competency their latest review scored. A member with no scored review on file shows a dash there instead of a number.

The list is sorted strongest-first: members with the highest average sit at the top, members with no score yet sit at the bottom. When a member has more than one performance review on file, only the most recent scored one counts, older reviews don't get averaged in or diluted against a newer one.

The empty state

If nobody on your active roster has a scored performance review yet, the Analysis screen doesn't show a blank panel. It shows the same scorecard laid out with sample numbers, a Sample badge in the corner and a note reading "Example. Yours fills in as you complete performance reviews.", so you can see the shape of the finished view before you have any data in it. Below the sample, a line of plain text explains what's missing: "Each rating from a performance review feeds this. Run a review and your crew's strengths and gaps appear here."

Read that literally: it isn't waiting on you to fill in a form on this screen. It's waiting on a review, forwarded or uploaded with per-skill ratings on it, to land for at least one active member.

How to use it

1. 1Open Team from the sidebar, then click the Skill Matrix tile in the Take Action row.
2. 2Read the Crew average panel first. The "Strongest" line tells you which competency your team collectively does best; a red bar tells you which one needs coaching attention across more than one person.
3. 3Scroll to By person and look at the bottom of the list first, not the top. Members with a dash instead of a score are the ones with no scored review on file, that's a gap in your review cadence, not a performance problem.
4. 4For a member near the top, check whether their "strongest" skill lines up with the role they're actually doing. A strong technical score on someone stuck doing paperwork is a role-fit conversation, not a training one.
5. 5If a whole competency reads weak across the crew average, that's a training-plan candidate. Open Training Plans to see what's queued, or plan a session that targets that specific skill.

Best-practice example

Say the Crew average panel reads 3.8/5, with "Strongest: Technical work" and a red bar on Communication at 3.1/5. Scrolling to By person, three technicians cluster near the top with strong technical scores but two of them show a dash, no scored review on file at all. That combination tells a plain story: your crew does good field work, but your review cadence has gaps, and the one competency that is genuinely soft, communication, is worth a targeted coaching push rather than a blanket training rollout. The next move is two things at once: get those two un-reviewed members a forwarded or uploaded review with ratings on it, and open a training plan aimed specifically at communication for the people already showing a low score there.

Data sources

Related articles

• Performance Reviews: structured, scored 1-on-1s
• Performance: peer-relative dimensions, not a single score
• Career paths: closing the gap to the next role
• Training plans
• The Team section: your crew, depth, and capacity at a glance
• Forwarding documents to Verinode