Read the skill heatmap

What this achieves

The heatmap lays skills across the top and people or departments down the side, and colours each cell by proficiency. It answers “who has what”, which is the question gap analysis cannot answer because it counts shortfalls rather than showing them.

Required role: Administrator.

Steps

Go to Talent & Growth → Insights → Skill Heatmap.
Choose the Scope.
For Department or Team, choose which one.
Optionally narrow the columns with the Skill Category filter.
Select a cell to drill in.

The skill heatmap at Organization scope, departments down the side and individual skills across the top, with coloured cells carrying proficiency levels one to five and blank cells where no proficiency is recorded.

The rows mean something different at each scope

This is the thing to establish before reading anything on the grid. The scope does not filter the same view — it changes what a row is and what a cell contains.

Option	Description
Organization	One row per department. Each cell is that department’s average proficiency in that skill.
Department	One row per employee in the department. Each cell is that person’s current level.
Team	One row per employee in the team. Each cell is that person’s current level.

Example: at HC Corp, the Organization view shows Engineering as one row averaging 34 people. Switching to the Department scope and choosing Engineering replaces that one row with 34 rows, one per person. An average of 3 can hide a team where half are at 5 and half are at 1.

Reading the colours

Cells are coloured across six proficiency values, from Not Assessed through to Expert. Hovering a cell names the person or department, the skill, and the level.

Not Assessed is a distinct value, not a low score. A blank-looking row usually means nobody has recorded that skill rather than that nobody has it — those are very different findings, and only one of them is about capability.

Example: a Sales row at HC Corp showing Not Assessed across most columns tells you Sales has not recorded its skills. It does not tell you Sales lacks them.

At department and team scope, cells can also carry a small trend marker showing whether the level is rising, falling, or steady.

Drilling in

Option	Description
Select a department row at Organization scope	Switches the view to that department, replacing the average with the individuals behind it.
Select an employee row at Department or Team scope	Opens that employee’s record.

The drill-down is the point of the screen. Read the Organization view to find where to look, then drill in, because an average is a starting point and never a conclusion.

Filtering by category

The Skill Category filter narrows which skills appear as columns. Use it when the grid is too wide to read — a heatmap of every skill in the library is a picture, not a report.

When the grid is empty

The screen says that no skill assessment data is available for the scope, and that employees need skills assigned and assessed. That is the actual cause almost every time: the analysis has no ratings to draw, not zero capability.

Assessment freshness matters here too. A level recorded years ago still shows as a level on this grid, so read the heatmap alongside skill freshness rather than on its own.

What happens next

The heatmap tells you the shape of a gap, which decides the response. Capability concentrated in one or two people is a key-person risk and a reason to spread it deliberately. Capability missing across a whole team is a hiring or training decision. Both look identical in a gap count and obvious on the heatmap.