Intranet and digital workplace skills matrix

Welcome to the Spark Trajectory skills matrix. We’ve created it to help define the skills and competencies covered by our industry and to help teams understand the skills they need to plan, operate and improve a successful digital workplace or intranet.  

It provides details of competencies essential for intranet and digital workplace people and teams. It contains five domain areas, each with nine skills (that’s 45 in total).

Version 2.0 beta

This is version 2.0 of the matrix, updated for the AI era.

We have aimed to make it endure: updating skills only where the character of the work has genuinely changed, rather than adding AI flavouring for its own sake.

The framework remains profession-wide and freely available under a Creative Commons licence for practitioners.

Errors? Disagreements? Omissions? Contact us

Skill levels

Each skill is broken down into three levels of increasing competency:

The skills matrix

We see digital workplace skills as an ever-changing confluence between two key areas (content and technology) supported by two supporting areas (User experience design and social and collaboration management). In the centre of the confluence are a series of practices and skills that may be carried out by either roles specific to Intranet and digital workplace or from any of the other four areas. The ownership of the centre waxes and wanes as the priorities and technologies change over time.

How to use the Spark Trajectory skills matrix

Click on the individual skill above to reach  the current web page version of each skill description and to view the three skill levels. Each skill has associated skills listed, as well as links to other resources and skills frameworks specific to each skill domain.

Intranet and digital workplace people can use this framework to:

  1. Understand where their skills lie
  2. Gauge how deep their skills are
  3. Work out where they can invest their time in development
  4. Plan their career
  5. Seek or offer mentoring within skills or across domains
  6. Help to articulate their skill set to others

Intranet and digital workplace teams can use this framework to:

  1. Understand who has what skill
  2. Map the skills of teams, project teams, or virtual teams
  3. Plan new roles or develop existing ones
  4. Plan training and development interventions
  5. Identify gaps in expertise and practice
  6. Facilitate conversations with vendors, HR and others

What changed in version 2.0 (March 2026)

Version 2.0 updates ten skills to reflect how AI has changed the character of intranet and digital workplace work. The changes focus on two themes: the management of content and retrieval systems so that AI tools produce accurate, trustworthy outputs; and the responsibilities that practitioners now carry when AI is used to generate, summarise, or surface information.

Updated skills include:

  • AI, search and retrieval management (formerly Search management)
  • Content management
  • Content design
  • Content strategy
  • Operational governance
  • Social content curation (formerly Curation and tagging)
  • Strategic governance
  • Product management and adoption (formerly Product management)
  • Taxonomy design and metadata management
  • Localisation
  • Risk management
  • Writing and editing

Skills where the tool used to do the work has changed (but not the underlying competency) have not been updated. For example, there are now lots of specific AI skills emerging within various Technology and IT management tasks, but these can be viewed as technology specific (such as a coding language or development methodology, and hence not useful to update here.

Errors? Disagreements? Omissions?

We have hopefully created this competency matrix with thought and care. It is not the only competency framework in the world, and relates specifically to the intranet and digital workplance profession. It therefore concentrates on some things and ignores others.

If you find an error, disagree wholeheartly or feel there is a glaring ommission we'd love to know.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Creative Commons License

Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

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  • NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.