Read the readiness matrix

What this achieves

The readiness matrix lists employees against the roles they are being measured for, with a score and a category for each pairing. It turns “is she ready for that job” into a comparison against what the job profile actually requires.

Required role: Administrator.

Before you start

A readiness score exists only where an employee has been scored against a target job profile, and a job profile can only be scored against if it states its competency and skill requirements. An empty matrix almost always means requirements have not been recorded, not that nobody is ready.

Steps

Go to Talent & Growth → Insights → Readiness.
Set Department, or leave it on All Departments.
Narrow further with the search box or the Category filter.
Read the distribution on the left and the table on the right.
Select Reset to clear the search and category filters.

The five categories

Option	Description
Ready Now	Meets the target role’s requirements.
Ready 1 Year	Expected to be ready within a year.
Ready 2 Years	Expected to be ready within two years.
Dev Needed	Development is needed before a timeframe is meaningful.
Not Ready	Does not currently meet the requirements.

A category is a summary of a score against one specific target role. The same person can be Ready Now for one role and Not Ready for another, and both rows are correct.

Example: James Whitfield reads Ready 1 Year against a senior engineering profile at HC Corp. That says nothing about his readiness for a management profile, which is a different set of requirements and would be a separate row.

The table

Option	Description
Employee	The person scored. Select the name to open their record.
Target Role	The job profile they were scored against.
Score	The overall readiness score.
Category	The readiness category the score falls into.
Gap Summary	A short summary of what is missing.

One employee can appear on more than one row — one per target role they have been scored against. The row count is therefore a count of scores, not a count of people.

The distribution chart does not follow the department filter

This is the trap on this screen, and it is worth knowing before you quote a figure off it.

Option	Description
The donut segments and legend counts	Every scored employee in the company. These do not change when you filter by department.
The average in the centre of the donut	Follows the Department filter. It does not follow the search box or the Category filter.
The table	Follows all three filters.

Example: filtering to Engineering at HC Corp gives you an Engineering table and an Engineering average, sitting inside a company-wide donut. Reading the centre figure and the segments as one picture would tell you Engineering’s average against the whole company’s distribution.

If you need a department’s distribution, read the counts by filtering the table to one category at a time rather than reading the chart.

Readiness for one person

Where an employee has been scored, their readiness can be read requirement by requirement rather than as a single number.

Option	Description
Overall readiness	The headline score against that target profile.
Competency score	How the competency requirements were met.
Skill score	How the skill requirements were met.
Competency gaps	Each competency with its current level, required level, weight, gap, and a status of Met, Partial, or Gap.
Skill gaps	Each skill with its current level, required level, and the same three statuses.

Two things in that list change how the score reads. Competency requirements carry a weight, so they do not contribute equally — a small gap on a heavily weighted competency moves the score more than a large gap on a light one. And a requirement can be Partial, which the company-wide gap analysis does not show, because that analysis counts a requirement as met or not met.

A score also carries the date it was calculated. It does not refresh on its own when an employee’s skills change, so a score is as at its calculation date.

Readiness is a comparison, not a judgement about a person

A readiness score compares recorded capability against recorded requirements. It knows nothing about judgement, reliability, or how someone performs under pressure, because none of that is in the comparison.

Use it to make a conversation specific — this requirement, at this level, is the distance — and let the decision about a person stay with the people who work with them.

What happens next

A readiness score is the input to development and to succession. A gap on a named requirement becomes a development plan or a course aimed at that requirement. A cluster of Ready Now scores against the same profile is a succession pipeline. A profile nobody is ready for is either a genuine capability problem or a job profile asking for more than the role needs, and it is worth checking which.