Employee Skills Matrix

Question

We are looking for a way to use SharePoint to manage an employee skills matrix. This matrix is currently an Excel spreadsheet, however this is becoming rather cumbersome.

Our data consists of:

• 150 different skills, separated in groups (likely to expand)
• 25 employees (likely to expand)
• Skill level for every employee against each skill, using a number-based scale (0 = no experience through to 3 = Proficient)

Example of the type of matrix we're using at the moment:

We'd like to be able to search for Skill X (or if possible: Skill X and Skill Y) and have SharePoint report back the employees with experience in this skill.

If possible, We'd still like to maintain the data in a single list so we easily can make adjustments, additions for new staff members/skills in a single view.

We are running SharePoint 2010, but have access to SharePoint 2013 if that helps.

I am very rusty with my SharePoint skills, so your help is much appreciated. I have access to SharePoint Designer and InfoPath Designer, but no back-end access to the SharePoint servers.

Answer 1

I found a solution which seems to work well.

I created three Lists:

1. Employees
   • Employee Name [free text]
   • Location [dropdown]
   • Resume [hyperlink]
2. Skills
   • Skill [free text]
   • Category [dropdown]
3. Master
   • Employee Name [lookup to Employees]
   • Location [additional lookup to Employees]
   • Skill [lookup to Skills]
   • Category [additional lookup to Skills]
   • Skill Level [choice]
   • Description [calculated based on skill level]

I then added the SharePoint InstantListFilter plugin to add filter text boxes to every column on the Master list view.

The great thing about the SharePoint InstantListFilter is that I could "install" it without backend access to the server, I just added a Content Editor Web Part and dumped in the code.

Hope this is useful for somebody in the future.

Answer 2

Put the skills under user profiles in SharePoint. Use SharePoint search to index and then you can present the users based on search results. This enables you to use refiners to identify groups of people with the requisite skill.