A director resigns in March, the chair wants a name before the next meeting, and you are the person who has to put something in front of the governance committee. A board skills matrix makes that conversation start from what the board is missing rather than from who the room already knows. Build yours below, then take the editable Word version into the meeting.
Tell us about your board
Number of directors
15 directors max
Want your matrix emailed (in Word)? 📄
What you get
- A board skills matrix laid out landscape, 13 competency rows, one mark per director per row. The threshold that earns the mark prints in a legend beneath the grid, so a mark means the same thing to everybody. It holds up to fifteen directors across one grid.
- An importance column set to essential, desirable or purchasable, which is what turns the grid into a decision.
- The composition facts most templates leave off: independence, tenure, the year each term expires, committee membership.
- An editable Word version in your inbox, with the definitions legend and the honesty note under the grid.
Every row is written at a threshold rather than a topic. Reading a balance sheet is expected of every director, so it is not a row; the row sits one level above, where somebody has held the accountability. Behaviour is not scored, because every director will claim independent judgement. It prints under the grid as an expectation of all directors instead.
| Competency | Importance | AB | CD | EF |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Financial oversight | Essential | X | X | X |
| Risk and compliance | Essential | X | X | |
| Technology, data and cyber | Essential | |||
| Sustainability | Purchasable |
The empty row is the output. Nobody clears the technology threshold and the board called it essential, so that row is a recruitment brief. Sustainability is empty too, but purchasable: a budget line, not a search.
How to build your board’s skills matrix
- Choose your board type: Corporation, credit union or bank, healthcare, public sector or Crown corporation, or not for profit. Each one adds the rows that board type actually gets asked about. Independence, tenure, the year each term expires and committee membership are on the grid whichever type you pick.
- Review it on screen, free, with every threshold and definition attached.
- Get the Word version. Share your email and we send the editable document, laid out landscape, ready for your directors’ initials.
- Set the importance column before you look at who marks what, circulate the file (the FAQ covers the two ways that work), and have the chair or the governance committee review it. Refresh with your annual board evaluation.
Ask your directors what the grid cannot tell
Aprio lets you run board and CEO evaluations, surveys and quick polls inside the portal, anonymous or attributed, and clone last year’s questions so this year’s answers line up against them.
Credit unions and financial institutions
Three rows join the grid: credit and lending, which replaces the generic sector row, capital and liquidity, and direct experience inside the deposit-taking regime you answer to. Executive leadership and other board service pick up “preferably within financial services” as a clause rather than becoming rows. It is also the one sector where boards publish numeric coverage targets, so a row reads as held against needed.
Canada is where the supervisory pressure sits. FSRA requires an Ontario credit union to end up with a board that holds the right skills and to nominate only people who bring them, without prescribing how you get there. BCFSA expects BC credit unions to evaluate board competency regularly and objectively, name the gaps, and keep evidence that the composition still fits. OSFI expects federally regulated financial institutions to run a competency evaluation process tied to succession and renewal, and never uses the words skills matrix. Quebec’s AMF expects the board of a financial services cooperative to hold the required competencies between them. None of that makes a matrix mandatory, and none of it is satisfied by a grid alone.
In the United States, no regulator sets a substantive competency or board-skills standard for credit union directors. Several states require a director-education policy or an annual plan, but none of them specifies hours, curriculum, testing or a required skills mix. The board writes its own standard.
Healthcare
Four rows come in for a hospital or health authority board: clinical or acute care, which replaces the generic sector row and marks clinical registration or having run a clinical service; quality and patient safety, which marks leading a quality improvement program or an accreditation cycle; clinical ethics; and health system and funder relations, meaning funding or system planning with the body that funds you. Data governance does not get a fifth row, because it already sits inside the technology row.
The expectation comes from accreditation rather than a regulator. Accreditation Canada’s governance standard requires the governing body to define its composition objectives, including the mix of competencies it needs. A competency matrix is named there as one way to do that, and the matrix itself is optional. What is not optional is being able to say what mix your governing body decided it needs.
In the United States the grid does not change: a hospital or health system board fills in the same rows, and the question underneath, what mix did your governing body decide it needs, is worth answering on either side of the border.
Public sector and Crown corporations
This group is the thinnest, and the thinness is the finding: there is no published Crown row set to import. What changes is structural. Public policy and government stops being a row you might mark and becomes one the board is expected to hold, with its threshold raised to a substantive role in policy, regulation or public administration. The attributes the Privy Council Office expects of every Crown director print above the grid rather than being scored inside it, because a matrix that scores what every appointee already has to have is scoring nothing. Two fields join the composition block: appointment date and appointing authority.
Those two fields exist because of the one instrument on this page that makes a skills matrix mandatory rather than optional. Ontario’s directive on agencies and appointments tells agencies to take the current skills matrix and any identified competency gaps into account when appointments are made, and it requires agency chairs to use that matrix to tell the minister where the gaps are. The directive is mandatory, so the matrix has to line up with the appointment cycle to be usable at all.
A US public agency or authority board uses the same rows. The appointment-cycle mechanics above are Ontario’s; they sit on this page because they are the one place a matrix is required rather than recommended.
Not for profits
A nonprofit board skills matrix that scores competencies and stops there leaves out half of what the recruitment conversation is about. BoardSource’s composition worksheet is built around access to networks, access to financial resources, personal style and expertise, and this group follows it: the doors each director can open, whether they can give or ask at a level that matters, up to four areas of expertise including lived experience, and up to two personal-style entries. Those caps are a per-member limit rather than a distribution imposed across the board, and they are the mechanism most templates leave out. The core grid stays underneath, because a nonprofit board still needs financial oversight and risk on it.
Very little law reaches this. Canada’s federal not-for-profit statute sets who may be a director and asks for no competency at all, and the duty it does impose, to act with the care, diligence and skill of a reasonably prudent person, is a standard of conduct rather than a competency anyone has to hold.
In the United States, the IRS annual return asks every filer a page of public governance questions, and not one of them asks about director competency or board skills. Beyond those, requirements vary by jurisdiction, so check your own incorporating statute.
Where skills matrices go wrong
A grid where every row is ticked is worth nothing, and the research shows how easily that happens. Between 2016 and 2022, Shapira and Nili found, the number of S&P 500 directors reported as having cybersecurity expertise went from 25 to 723. Of the 570 newly marked cases, 348 came from a company adding a cybersecurity row to its matrix, not from a new appointment. That is a change in what gets disclosed rather than proof anyone acquired the expertise. They call it board washing.
The theory behind these grids also has a null result against it. Adams, Akyol and Verwijmeren looked across 3,218 firm-years and found that boards with greater skill diversity did not perform better. Read that for what it says: skill diversity on its own does not predict performance, which argues against treating a full grid as the goal, not against knowing what your board is missing.
So when a director asks whether this is box-ticking, the answer is that a grid where every row is ticked would be exactly that, and this one is built so it cannot fill up. Every mark has a printed threshold, somebody has to be able to name the organization and the period behind it, and what the board needs is settled before anyone looks at who holds what. That is also what makes it usable when your regulator, your auditor or your accreditation surveyor asks how the board decides which competencies it needs and how it knows whether it has them.
What the rules actually say in the US and Canada
No private-sector organization in the United States or Canada is legally required to keep a board skills matrix. What does exist is a set of expectations about whether your board can show it holds the competencies it needs, and they differ by who you are. The short version:
| Who you are | Who sets the expectation | What they expect |
|---|---|---|
| Credit union or financial institution in Canada | FSRA in Ontario, BCFSA in BC, OSFI federally, the AMF in Quebec | FSRA requires the result: a board that holds the right skills. BCFSA and OSFI expect a documented process for evaluating competency and naming gaps. None of them requires a matrix. |
| Hospital or health authority in Canada | Accreditation Canada, through your accreditation cycle | That the governing body defines the mix of competencies it needs. A matrix is one accepted way to record it, and it is optional. |
| Crown corporation or public agency | The government that appoints your directors | Ontario’s appointments directive is the one rule here that makes a skills matrix mandatory: chairs use it to tell the minister where the competency gaps are. |
| Not for profit, either country | Your incorporating statute, and the IRS in the US | Who may serve, and a duty to act with care and diligence. No competency requirement, and nothing that asks for a matrix. |
| Credit union or bank in the United States | NCUA, the federal banking regulators, some state regulators | Requirements land on individual directors, mainly financial expertise on the audit committee. Some states require a director-education plan with the content left to the board. Nobody sets a standard for the board’s overall skill mix. |
Read across that table and the pattern is clear. Canada asks how you decide what your board needs. The United States asks about particular directors, never about the board as a whole, so assessing collective skills there is voluntary everywhere.
In one of the four sectors above, expect to be asked how you evaluate board competency, and a documented matrix with defined thresholds is a reasonable answer to have ready. Everywhere else, build it because it is useful rather than because it is filed.
Have the record ready when the auditor asks
Aprio keeps board materials, votes and evaluations in one place, with attendance reporting and an audit trail your next review can follow.
Frequently asked questions
Is the board skills matrix template free?
Yes. Read the whole matrix on screen with every threshold attached, free. Enter your email and the editable Word version arrives in your inbox.
How do we get directors to fill it in?
Two approaches work. Send the same file to every director with one instruction, put an X under your name where you meet the printed threshold. Or fill in a draft from their biographies and ask each director to correct their own column.
What is the difference between a board skills matrix and a board composition matrix?
Mostly vocabulary. Corporate and regulated boards say skills matrix and think about what directors have done. Nonprofits say board composition matrix and think about skills plus networks and giving capacity. This builder covers both.
Is a board skills matrix required by law?
No. No private-sector organization in the United States or Canada is legally required to keep one. Several Canadian regulators expect a skills and competency evaluation process, notably BCFSA for BC credit unions, OSFI for federally regulated financial institutions and the AMF for Quebec financial services cooperatives, and Accreditation Canada’s governance standard names a competency matrix as one way to define the mix of competencies a governing body needs. In the United States such requirements apply to individual directors, not to the board as a whole.
Should directors rate their own skills?
Not on their own. Self-assessment is how most of these grids get filled in, and the main reason they inflate. Have the chair or the governance committee review the completed grid, and take off any mark nobody can attach an organization and a period to.