Using Trello to Create a Personal Skills Matrix

When creating a person development plan, you need to know what skills you are good at and what items you need improvement on.  Furthermore, you want to be tracking this information over the long term.  As you work on a skill, it will improve.  Also though, new needs will emerge and you need to be able to add these to your matrix and decide where they fit in.

What we are talking about here is conducting a skills assessment and getting our skills into a skills matrix.  There are a number of tools that we could use for this, but I am going to show you how it can be done in a tool called Trello.

Trello is a free online Kanban board, but it is also easily adapted to a variety of other purposes.  For our purpose, we are really just using the fact that we can create cards in the board, group them together in columns and do some basic commenting and sorting.  For our skills matrix, we don't need to move cards between columns.  Still, everything we need to do is well within Trello's capabilities.

Creating Your Skills Matrix

This is what we want our end product to look like:

As you can see, each column forms a group of related skills.  I have columns for .NET Development, Web Development, Database and Professional Skills.  In reality, you would probably have a few more columns, I just want to keep this example to the point.  Don't worry though, Trello will let you create as many columns as you need to.  Then, within each column, you create an item (a card in Trello terminology) for each skill and give yourself a rating for that skill.

OK, so how do we get to this point.

Creating Your Skills Matrix

Lets walk through step by step how to do this.

Create a Trello Account
Go to Trello.com and click on the big green button in the middle of the page.  You can create an independent Trello account or login with your Google account.

Create Your First Board
Click on the grey box that says "Create new board...".  When prompted, call this board "Skills Matrix or something similar.

Add Columns To Your Board
On the left hand side of the board you will see a box that says "Add a list...".  Click on the textbox here and add your first column.  Once you have added this column, you will see this same box, just moved to the right, so keep clicking it to add all of the columns you need.

Remember, columns are just groupings of skills, and you can group these skills any way you want.  You can also add columns at any time if a new skill group emerges or you want to break an existing column into two groups to make things easier to manage and visualize.

Here are some sample groups you might consider:

• C#/.NET Development
• Web Development (focusing on front end aspects like HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JS frameworks)
• Database Development (SQL, Data Modeling, Query Tuning, etc)
• Servers (IIS, Windows Server)
• Cloud Technologies
• Data Analysis and Reporting
• Professional Skills (Soft Skills)

Don't feel like you have to have all of these categories or use the same ones I do.  Come up with what works best for you.  If you need to change it up later, no worries.  Probably the only one that everyone should have is professional skills.  The others depend on what role you have and what technologies you work with.


Add Labels To Your Board
We need to be able to rate ourselves on each of these skills so we know where we are strong and where we need to improve.  We are going to use a four point rating system as follows:

• Mastery (Green) - I am highly proficient at this skill, so much that I can teach it to someone else.  This is really something I know inside and out.
• Proficient (Blue) - This is something I am very good at.  I can usually perform tasks involving this skill without asking questions or the help of others.  I'm able to quickly perform these tasks and rarely have defects in my work
• Developing (Orange) - I have some experience with this skill, but these are items that tend to take longer than others as I am still learning this skill.  I may have quite a few questions or need the assistance of others when doing these items.  I tend to look a lot of things up.  I may also have received feedback that this is an area I need to improve.
• Novice  (Red) - This is a new skill to me.  I have heard of it, but I have worked with it very little or not at all.  But this is something I want to track because I feel it will be important for me to develop in this area at some point.

You actually can choose any color scheme you want, it is just that we want to break things down so we have quick visual cues of where we are at on our skills.

To do this in Trello, look on the right hand sidebar and click the link that says "More"

Then, again in the right hand sidebar, click the link that says "Labels"

Finally, you will see the Label colors, and to give these a name, you just click on each one and type the names you want (the names that we gave above -- Mastery, Proficient, Developing, Novice)

Now we will be able to add these to our cards when we start creating them below.

Start Adding Cards for Each Skill You Have, Need or Want to Acquire
Now, in each column, click on the link that says "Add a card..." and starting adding cards for each skill.

How Do I Know What Skills I Should Add

Glad you asked.  The first thing is to ask yourself what are the skills needed for your current role.  These are usually things like languages, frameworks and features of languages.  For example, if you are a C# developer, you don't just want to put C# in the .NET Develpment column.  Break this down by features that you need to use in your role.  For example, you could have cards for each of the following:

• General C# Constructs
• Object Orientated Programming
• Generics
• Parallel Execution/Threading/Async Programming
• Entity Framework
• WCF
• Design Patterns
• SOA

And so forth.  You want to break things down such that each one is a self contained group of knowledge.

One good way to get an idea of the skills needed for your role is to look at job descriptions for titles similar to yours and see what skills employers are asking for.  If you are a web developer and keep seeing Angular.js over and over again in various job postings, that is a pretty good indication that is an important skill and should be on your matrix somewhere.

You also want to consider how your job is changing and where you want to go with your career.  Ask yourself, if I am in my same role 12-24 months from now, what new technologies are emerging that I will need to know to remain effective in this job.  If you are looking to move into a different role, look at others already in that role and ask yourself what skills do they have that make them successful in that role.

You are likely to end up with quite a list, and that is the point.  We will narrow down what we will work on later, but what we want to do is capture what knowledge we have or could need so we can prioritize what we need to work on.

This List is Meant to Be Dynamic

You just went to a user group meeting and everyone was talking about this great new JavaScript framework!  Or cloud technology!  Or super cool shiny fancy gizmo!  This is going to happen, and this is one of the reasons we use Trello.  It handles these dynamic situations well.

Create a new card for this technology under the appropriate grouping.  In the Card, add some notes about why you are excited about the technology and how it relates to the work you are doing.  And now, you are tracking this skill along with all of your other skills.  As you prioritize what you want to learn, you can evaluate your need for this skill with all of your other development opportunities.  But the point is that you have written it down, so now it won't get lost or forgotten about.  Maybe this is so important that you really will start working on learning it next month.  Maybe it will be six months.  No matter.  The point is as you learn about any new skill that you need to learn, get it on the board so it can be tracked.

Rating Yourself in Terms of Proficiency

Now for each skill, you want to rate yourself using the scale described above.  If you are unsure about a skill, a good way to determine where you are really at is to go look at the table of contents for a couple Pluralsight courses on the topic.  Go through each major area and ask yourself if you really know that area well enough that you can perform that function without help.  If there are a lot of areas you are unfamiliar with or feel you need help in, this is probably pointing to rating yourself lower.

The important thing here is to be honest with yourself.  This is not a job interview.  This is for you, to know the areas you really need more practice in.  No one else is going to see this other than you, so don't be afraid to be candid with where you need to improve.

For items that you rate yourself lower in, you can also go into the card and add some comments about areas that you feel you need to improve.  As we will see below, you aren't going to work on all of these at once, so it is useful to have some notes about what specific parts of the skill you think you need to improve at.  Again, this is an advantage of Trello in that it supports this ability to store some notes along with each card.

Where Do I Go From Here?

At this point, you have lots of different skills in different categories, and more than a few of these will have ratings of novice or developing on them.

So pick at most two of those skills to work on.  And then create a plan to work on those one to two skills over the next six to eight weeks (I'll go into how to create this plan in another post).  What we want is a focused effort for a relatively short duration of time so that we can move the one or two skills up to the next level.  Then, we'll come back to the board and look at what the next set of skills are that we should focus on and repeat the process all over again.  We might pick a specific skill a couple of times in a row if it is really important and an area we need to grow in, or we might pick different skills.  But the point is we are really focusing in one one or two items at a time and improving ourselves in those areas.

Wrapping Up

You don't have to use Trello if there is another Kanban type board that you like and want to use.  The important point is that we are cataloging our skills and getting a visual representation of where we are and what we need to work on.  At a glance, we can tell where we need to be spending our time.  And this helps us spend our development time more effectively, because we are spending our time improving on one of these topics, not wondering what we should work on next.

This approach is also flexible.  We can store notes to ourselves on each card, like specific areas we feel we need improvement in or the names of resources someone has recommended to us.  When we hear about something new we think we might need to learn, we just have to add a card to our board, and not it is included in the big picture of how we need to develop.  And through Trello, we have related skills grouped together, can filter on skills or search all of our cards.  So this electronic version really makes a lot of sense.

I hope this has been useful to you, and if you come up with any additional pointers, leave them in the comments so others can benefit from your learning's.