Skillforests
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Skill maps for teams

Careers, navigated by map — not guesswork.

Skillforests turns the tangled skills of a role into a clear, team-specific map — so every person can see exactly where they stand, what comes next, and how to get there.

Start with a single tree. No card, no setup — works on paper too.

6
trees per role
48
skills mapped
3
levels per skill
Why a map

A spreadsheet rots in a year. A map people use stays true.

See the gaps and blocks

Read coverage for every critical skill at a glance. A gap on a skill your next project needs is a commitment you can't yet keep — now you can see it coming.

Find single points of failure

Spot the skill exactly one person holds — before they're on leave and you find out the hard way. Grow a second owner deliberately.

Data people keep current

Because the map helps individuals grow their own careers, they keep it accurate — bottom-up, not a once-a-year chore nobody trusts.

Better to develop 3 skills well than 10 poorly.

Who it's for

One map, read four ways.

The same forest serves the person growing, the lead planning, the coach guiding, and the org deciding.

Growing skills

Individuals

See where you stand and the exact next step in your career — the right skills, in the right order, a few at a time. No vague “learn more.”

Growing teams

Team leaders

One picture of what your team can do — coverage, gaps, and single points of failure. Reviews and 1:1s grounded in levels, not adjectives.

Growing people

Coaches & trainers

An honest baseline per person and a development plan that falls out of the map — the gap between here and the goal, in the order it has to be learned.

Skill management

HR & leadership

One org-wide view of capability — where you're thin, where the cross-team risks are, who's near the next rank, and whether you can staff a project before you commit.

In practice

Used on paper, before an app existed — and it still moved the numbers.

A talent pump

Performance Media

Unable to hire seniors fast enough, they hired for attitude below junior and trained to delivery level fast — one lead scaling training across a growing org.

5 → 17
specialists across three teams, under two years
~6 mo
zero-experience to junior, vs. ~a year
the usual onboarding and promotion time
Internal
nearly all senior hiring, filled by promotion
Confidence & ownership

Peatix

Mid-rewrite to modern frameworks, the map showed developers what to learn to lead an epic — and made a hard-to-visualise legacy codebase learnable for new joiners.

1 → many
from a single go-to person to distributed ownership
Level 2–3
the point developers felt ready to lead an epic
Faster
onboarding into a complex legacy codebase
~3 yrs
of frontend, then front + back, on the map

Where Performance Media is about building talent fast, Peatix is about unlocking talent already there. The blocker wasn't skill — it was a clear picture of the system. The map supplied both.

The method

Your forest begins with a single tree.

We build it with your team, not for them — so they're co-authors who feel ownership and pour in the domain knowledge that makes the forest real.

01
Scope with leaders
Environment, business and operational requirements.
02
Workshop with the team
Tasks become skills; skills become trees.
03
Grow it, then keep it honest
Review individuals monthly, the forest every six.
Skillforests

Start with a single tree.

Map one role, mark what you know, and see the exact next step. It works on paper — but it's better here.

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