Competency matrix

A competency matrix is a visual diagram or chart that shows the skills and education required for separate roles within a company. Before we dive into competency matrix definitions, a few things need to be understood.

First, not all organizations use a competency matrix to hire and promote employees, and second, each organization that does use it will have different requirements.

The reason it was decided to have a section on competency is that every company has differing competencies tied to distinct levels. What this means is that a senior DevOps engineer at company X may map to a DevOps engineer at Google. This caused me anxiety and frustration early in my career. I hope this section can give you enough clarity on the correlation between level, competency, and pay.

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce you to the concept of a competency matrix as well as adding another tool to track your progress as your skills increase. We will start by breaking...