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Overview

Resource planning is the practice of matching your organization’s skill capacity to its needs. Before you can staff a project effectively, make a hiring decision, or prioritize a training initiative, you need to know what skills your team currently has, where the gaps are, and who is best positioned to fill them. SkillsDB gives you a connected set of tools to do exactly that. Rather than relying on spreadsheets or informal knowledge, you can use real assessment data, benchmark comparisons, and skills matrices to make resourcing decisions on a solid foundation. This tutorial covers the end-to-end resource planning workflow:

1. Assess your team’s current skill state — understand who has what, at what level, across your organization’s defined Careers
2. Identify gaps and strengths — use the Skills Matrix and Career Overview to pinpoint where capacity is thin and where it’s strong
3. Find the right people — use Find Experts to search for individuals with specific skills across your organization
4. Build upskilling plans — use Learning Plans to close gaps and track development progress
5. Monitor training coverage — use the Training Matrix to confirm skills are being trained and certifications are current

Resource planning in SkillsDB is primarily used by managers, directors, executives, and administrators. Employees can view their own skills data and learning plans, but the team-level analytics described here require manager-level access or higher.

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Prerequisites

Before following this tutorial, confirm that:

• Your organization has defined Careers (role definitions with skills and benchmark grades) in SkillsDB
• Employees have been assigned to Careers by a manager or administrator
• Assessments have been completed so that skills have recorded grades to compare against benchmarks
• You have manager-level access or higher to view team skills data

If Careers have not been configured or assessments have not been run, contact your administrator before proceeding. The skills data in SkillsDB is only as useful as the assessment coverage behind it.

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Step 1: Get an Overview of Your Team’s Skill Coverage

The starting point for resource planning is understanding how your team’s skills are distributed across the Careers you manage.

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Navigate to Team Skills

1. Select Skills from the left sidebar navigation under the Team section.

The My Team Skills page opens, showing a consolidated summary of your team’s skills organized by Career.

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Understanding the My Team Skills table

The table is organized into three sections: Below these rows, a collapsible Careers group lists each Career assigned to your team. For each Career, the table shows:

• People Assigned — how many people in your team hold this Career
• Skills — how many skills are attached to this Career definition

Select any Career row to open the Career Overview for that role and see a deeper breakdown of skill coverage, proficiency distributions, and performance rankings.

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Scoping to direct reports or your full org

If you manage a large or multi-level team, you can scope the view:

• By default, the page shows your full reporting organization — everyone who reports to you, directly or indirectly.
• Administrators can toggle Direct Reports in the filter bar to limit the view to their immediate direct reports only.

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Step 2: Analyze Skill Coverage for a Specific Career

Once you’ve identified a Career you want to examine, select it to open the Career Overview page. This page gives you a visual and data-driven breakdown of skill health for that role across your team.

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The Career Overview stats bar

At the top of the Career Overview, a stats bar shows key metrics for this Career: | Skills w/ Training | What percentage of skills in this Career have at least one linked training resource | A high Below Target percentage signals that a significant portion of your team’s skills are below the expected proficiency level for this role. A low Skills w/ Training percentage means that many skill gaps don’t have a training path defined — a signal to work with your administrator on adding learning resources.

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The Career Overview charts

Below the stats bar, the Career Overview displays several charts and tables to help you understand skill health at a glance:

• Beeswarm Chart — shows the distribution of average skill levels across your team, visualizing clustering and outliers
• Bar Chart — compares manager-assessed grades to employee self-assessed grades by skill, useful for identifying perception gaps
• Skills Matrix preview — a condensed grid of skills versus people with color-coded grades; select Full Report to open the complete Skills Matrix
• People ranking — your team members ranked by average skill grade; toggle between Top and Bottom to identify your strongest contributors and those who may need the most development support
• Skills ranking — your Career’s skills ranked by average grade; toggle between Top and Bottom to identify your team’s strongest capabilities and deepest gaps

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Drilling into the full Skills Matrix

The full Skills Matrix is the most detailed view available for resource planning. To open it, select Full Report on the Skills Matrix preview or select Skills Matrix from the Career Overview breadcrumb. The Skills Matrix displays a grid where:

• Rows represent individual people on your team, grouped by level (for example: Junior, Mid, Senior)
• Columns represent the skills defined in the Career
• Cells show each person’s grade for each skill, color-coded by gap status

Use the Skills Matrix to answer specific resource planning questions:

• “Who on my team is ready to lead this project?” — find people with green or blue grades across the relevant skills
• “What is our coverage risk for this skill?” — look at how many people have red or no-grade cells in a column
• “Which team members have the most development needs?” — look for rows with many red badges

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Step 3: Find People with Specific Skills

When you need to identify who in your organization has a particular skill — to staff a project, form a team, or find a subject-matter expert — use Find Experts.

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Navigate to Find Experts

1. Select Find Experts from the left sidebar navigation under the Explore section.

The Find Experts page opens with a search bar and type filter tabs.

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Searching by skill, career, or keyword

You can search across multiple dimensions: Select the appropriate scope tab in the filter bar, then type your search term. Results appear instantly as you type.

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Filtering results

For People searches, you can apply additional filters using the builder filter panel:

• Business Unit, Division, Department, Team — filter by organizational structure
• Country, State, City, Site, Region — filter by location
• Job Title — filter by job title
• Flag — filter by people flags applied to individuals (such as Expert or Mentor designations)

For Skill searches, you can filter by minimum proficiency grade — for example, to find only people who have been assessed at Level 3 or above for a given skill. Use the Match all / Match any toggle to control how multiple filters interact:

• Match all — results must satisfy every active filter (narrower)
• Match any — results can satisfy any one of the active filters (broader)

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Navigating to a person’s profile

Select any person in the search results to open their individual profile. From a person’s profile, you can:

• View their full skill grades across all assigned Careers
• See their self-assessment and manager-assessment grades for each skill
• View their benchmark comparison and skill gaps
• See their assigned learning plan and certification status
• Manage their Career assignment, assessments, and development plan

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Step 4: Build Development Plans to Close Gaps

Once you’ve identified skill gaps — either through the Skills Matrix, Career Overview, or individual profiles — you can take action by assigning learning resources to close them.

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Assigning a learning resource to a team member

Learning resources are assigned to individuals through their Learning Plan. To assign a resource:

1. Navigate to the person’s profile by selecting them from the People section in the sidebar under the Team section, or by finding them through Find Experts.
2. From their profile, navigate to their Learning Plan.
3. Assign a library resource or ask your administrator to link learning resources to the Career so they appear automatically.

Alternatively, use the upskilling view on the person’s own Skills page to find and recommend resources linked to their specific skill gaps.

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Monitoring learning plan progress

Assigned learning resources appear in the person’s Learning Plan, organized into four stages: To Do, In Progress, Completed, and Archived. Employees move resources through these stages themselves as they progress. As a manager, you can view any team member’s Learning Plan to track:

• Which resources they are actively working through
• Which resources they have completed and when
• Their self-reported ratings on completed resources

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Viewing team-wide learning activity

To see all learning activity across your team in one place, use the All Activity view under Training in the Team section of the sidebar.

1. Select Training from the left sidebar under the Team section.
2. The page opens in the All Activity view, showing all learning plan items and training approval requests for your team in a single table.

Use the Type filter to focus on Learning Plan items specifically, and the Status filter to find resources that are in progress, completed, or have not yet been started.

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Step 5: Track Training Dates and Certification Coverage

For roles where training compliance matters — such as safety-critical or regulated functions — resource planning must also account for formal training records, expiration dates, and certifications.

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The Training Matrix

The Training Matrix shows which team members have recorded training dates for each skill in a role, and whether those records are current, pending, or expired.

1. Select Training from the left sidebar under the Team section.
2. Select the Training breadcrumb at the top of the page and choose Training Matrix.

The Training Matrix displays a grid where rows are skills and columns are team members. Each cell shows:

• A date and green badge if training has been recorded and approved
• A yellow badge if a training approval request is pending review
• An Expiring Soon or Expired badge if the training record is approaching or past its expiration
• NA if the skill is not assigned to that person’s Career
• A dash if the skill is assigned but no training date has been recorded

Use the Has Training Date toggle to hide skills where no one has recorded training yet, focusing the matrix on skills with active coverage. Use the Role filter to scope the matrix to a specific Career.

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Certifications

If your organization tracks professional certifications — credentials that require submission, approval, and renewal — you can view certification status for your team from the Certifications section.

1. Select Certifications from the left sidebar under the Team section.

From here, you can see which team members have been assigned certifications, the status of each (submitted, approved, expiring, expired), and take action on pending submissions. Certification tracking is especially valuable in resource planning when certain roles require specific credentials before an employee can be deployed on a project.

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Putting it All Together: a Resource Planning Workflow

Here is how the above steps connect into a practical resource planning workflow: Scenario: You need to staff a project that requires expertise in three specific skills. You also want to confirm your team’s overall readiness for an upcoming audit that involves those same skills.

1. Open My Team Skills (Team > Skills). Confirm the relevant Career exists in your team’s Career list. Note the number of people assigned and the total skills defined.
2. Select the Career to open the Career Overview. Check the Meets Target and Below Target percentages to understand overall readiness. Look at the People ranking to identify your top performers in this role.
3. Open the full Skills Matrix (select Full Report). Filter or scan the three specific skills. Identify which team members have green or blue grades for all three — these are your project-ready candidates. Note which team members have red grades — these are development targets.
4. Use Find Experts (Explore > Find Experts) to confirm your candidates. Search by skill to verify grades and check for additional attributes like location or flag designations. Select a candidate’s name to open their profile and review their full skill record.
5. Assign learning resources to team members with red grades for the targeted skills. Use their Learning Plan to assign specific training. Monitor progress from the All Activity view (Team > Training).
6. Check the Training Matrix (Team > Training > Training Matrix). Confirm that team members assigned to this Career have current training dates for the critical skills. Follow up on any Expiring Soon or Expired records before the project begins.
7. Review certifications (Team > Certifications). Confirm that required credentials are approved and not expiring during the project timeline.

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Common Questions

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