How a Market of Skills session works

The idea: a market, not a form

Most skills matrices are filled in by a manager, alone, from memory — or by an HR form nobody returns to. The Market of Skills turns that around. Each person is a stall-holder at a market: they put out what they have to offer, look at what others have, and say what they have come to find. Skills get named by the people who hold them, and seen by the people who work beside them.

The session, step by step

1. 1

   Before: everyone fills in their skills

   A few minutes each, in the days before

   Each person lists on their profile what they have, what they are best at and what they want to learn. Their booth starts from a better place, and the matrix is seeded from it.

2. 2

   Booths: what you sell, might offer, and want to buy

   15–20 minutes

   Everyone opens a booth with three lists: skills To Sell (what they do well and would happily help others with), skills they May Be able to offer (done it, not their main thing) and skills To Buy (what they want to learn). People are encouraged to include things outside their role.

3. 3

   Presentations: each booth gets the floor

   2–3 minutes per person

   One at a time, each person presents their booth to the team. The rest leave feedback, especially "you also have" — a skill the presenter did not list but colleagues have seen them use. Teammates often see strengths people leave out.

4. 4

   Reflection: the team looks at itself

   15 minutes

   The team talks about the whole, not about individuals: what are we capable of together, what surprised us, which learning opportunities excite us most.

5. 5

   Merge: the session becomes the matrix

   Afterwards, by the facilitator

   The facilitator reviews what the session found and merges it into the team's skills matrix: To Sell becomes Proficient, May Be becomes Competent, To Buy becomes a growth target, and a skill a teammate spotted is added too. The session is over; the map it produced stays.

Facilitating one? The facilitator guide has the run sheet: a minute-by-minute agenda and what to say at each stage.

What you walk out with

• A skills matrix — every member, every skill the team named, rated on one five-level scale. Because the session merges into it, the matrix is the session's lasting output, not a separate document.
• Pairings — someone who wants to learn a skill a teammate rates Expert in is a mentoring pair waiting to happen, and the matrix shows it.
• Risks — a skill only one person holds at Proficient or above is a single point of failure, visible for the first time.
• A team that knows itself — the reflection is often the part people remember. Teams routinely discover skills nobody had known were in the room.

Do it once a quarter. A short session keeps the map true, and Kunska flags a matrix nobody has touched in a while.

Who it is for

Teams that run on expertise: engineering, design, legal, consulting, research. Anywhere from four to twenty people, with a lead or facilitator who wants staffing, growth plans and the next hire to start from evidence rather than from whoever spoke last. It works in a room and it works on a call; the booths, the presentations and the feedback all happen in the browser.

In Kunska, a session is started from a team's page and the roster is the team — there is nothing to set up, no code to type and no one to invite by hand. The facilitator moves the room from stage to stage, and everyone's screen follows.