LMSAvailable now
The Skills Dashboard is a Moodle block that redraws your skills matrix from the competency and learning plan data your site already holds. Each duty area becomes a band, each skill a tile carrying its required rating, the learner's own rating and a status, and tiles linked to a course open that course in one tap. It is a display over Moodle's competency framework — assessment still happens where it always did.
A skills matrix is how hands-on industries have described a job for decades. Duty areas run across the top, and the tasks that make up each duty are listed underneath. Training teams build whole programmes around that chart, print it, and put it on the training-room wall, because it is the one artefact everybody in the room understands.
Then the training moves into an LMS and the chart disappears. The learner gets a list of courses. And nobody can answer the only question the chart existed to answer: where am I on this?
Why we built it
A client running competency-based training for technical operators came to us with a programme already live in Moodle. The framework was modelled correctly, the courses were linked to the right competencies, the ratings were being recorded. None of that was the problem. The problem was that learners still could not see their own position at a glance.
Moodle's own competency screens are accurate, and they are lists. A learning plan renders as rows of competency names with a status beside each one. That is a faithful representation of the data and a poor representation of the job, because it does not show the shape of the work — which duties exist, how many skills sit under each, and which of those duties is nearly finished.
So the trainers had been redrawing progress by hand. Spreadsheets. Printed charts marked up with a highlighter. They were maintaining a parallel copy of information the LMS already held, because the shape mattered more to them than the data being technically available.
The block's whole job is to put the wall chart back on the learner's screen, drawn from the competency data Moodle already holds. Nothing is entered twice.
A short primer: competencies and learning plans in Moodle
Many Moodle sites have this feature switched off and their administrators have never had a reason to look at it. It is worth understanding before the rest of this makes sense.
A competency framework is a structured list of what someone must be able to do. In Moodle it is a tree, which is the important part: a duty area can have its individual skills nested beneath it. That nesting is exactly what this block reads to draw its bands.
A learning plan is that framework handed to one person. Plans are normally created from a template, so an entire intake gets the same plan in a single action rather than one at a time.
Competencies are then linked to courses. Completing the course can mark the competency complete automatically, or an assessor can rate it by hand — which matters enormously in operational roles, where the real evidence is a qualified person watching the work being done, not a quiz score.
Each competency carries a rating scale and a proficient flag. The rating is the level achieved; proficiency is the separate yes-or-no judgement that the standard has been met. Those two are not the same thing, and keeping them apart is the point.
Which is the argument for turning the feature on at all: it separates courses completed from skills held. A person can finish four courses and still not be signed off on the one task the job actually depends on. Competencies are how an LMS can tell the difference.
What the block shows
One band per duty area, in the framework's own order, carrying the duty's name, a progress bar and a percentage. That percentage is completed skills divided by total skills in the band — and only proficiency counts toward it, so a band stays short of 100% until every skill under it has been signed off.
Inside each band, one tile per skill, and each tile carries four things: the required rating in the top left, the skill code in the top right, the status in the bottom left, and the learner's own rating in the bottom right. Putting the required rating and the achieved rating on the same tile is deliberate — the gap between “rated 2” and “needs 3” is visible rather than something you go and look up.
There are four statuses, evaluated in that order:
- Completed — the competency has been marked proficient.
- Pending Review — the work is done and an assessor has not yet rated it.
- In Progress — the linked course has been started.
- Not Started — no progress and no evidence.
Tiles that are linked to a course are clickable, so a learner goes from “not started” straight into the course that teaches it. A skill with no linked course still appears; it simply does not click.
Status colours are per-block settings, so an organisation can match whatever colour conventions its people already read fluently. Text colour is then chosen automatically for legibility against whatever has been picked, using a perceived-brightness calculation rather than a guess, so a pale gold and a deep blue both stay readable. Two layout styles ship: pale tiles with a coloured top edge, or tiles filled with the status colour outright.
Learners who are on more than one plan get a row of plan buttons and switch between them in place.
Worked example
A worked example: an FMCG packing line
The illustration above uses a fast-moving consumer goods plant, because FMCG manufacturing is close to a worst case for this problem and a good test of whether the format holds up.
A packing line operator's job breaks cleanly into duty areas — hygiene and food safety, running the line itself, quality and batch records — and each carries skills that are assessed very differently from one another. Complete Batch Documentation can be evidenced by a course and a check of the paperwork. Handle Allergen Changeovers cannot: somebody qualified has to watch it done correctly, on a real changeover, before anyone signs it off. Moodle models both perfectly well, because a competency can be completed by course activity or rated by an assessor, and the block shows them side by side without distinguishing between how they were earned.
Three things about FMCG make the matrix view earn its place. Lines are reconfigured constantly, so an operator's required skills change with the product being run, and a supervisor deciding who can staff tomorrow's changeover needs to see readiness rather than course history. Audits ask about people, not courses — a retailer or food-safety auditor asks who is signed off on a critical control, which is a proficiency question, not a completion one. And turnover is high, so a new starter needs to understand the shape of the job on day one, and a chart they already recognise from the wall does that faster than an induction deck.
None of this is specific to food manufacturing. Any operation that trains people to a defined standard — pharmaceutical production, utilities, logistics, clinical support — has the same structure and the same gap between courses completed and skills held.
How it helps
For the learner, it is orientation and momentum. The chart on screen is the same chart that was on the training-room wall, so it needs no explanation. The next thing to do is visibly the next unstarted tile, and it is one tap from the course that teaches it.
For the trainer or assessor, it is fewer status questions. The ratings sit next to the requirement, so the conversation starts from what is actually outstanding rather than from working out where somebody is.
For the organisation, the chart the programme was designed around becomes the thing learners actually see, without anyone maintaining a parallel spreadsheet. Everything is drawn from competency data already in Moodle, so it stays current on its own.
Works the same on a phone
This is the same block, not a cut-down version of it, and it appears in the Moodle app as well as in a phone browser.
The duty area's name moves above its skills, and the skills stay on one swipeable row, so a programme with a dozen duty areas does not become an endless vertical scroll. That matters on a shop floor or in the field, where people check progress between shifts on whatever device is in their pocket.
Frequently asked questions
Can assessors rate or approve skills from the block?
No. It is a display. Rating, marking proficiency and approving reviews all still happen on Moodle's own learning plan screens, and the block reflects whatever has been recorded there.
Is there a manager or organisation-wide view?
No. Each learner sees their own skills only. There is no cohort or roll-up view in this version.
Does reaching the required rating mark a skill complete?
No. Both rating figures on a tile are display only. A skill reads as Completed when it has been marked proficient, which is a separate judgement from the rating level achieved.
Does it replace Moodle's competency features?
No — it presents them. The framework, the plans, the course links and the ratings are all standard Moodle competency data, and the block reads them without duplicating anything.
Will it work with our existing competency framework?
Any framework that nests skills under a parent grouping will draw correctly, whatever methodology produced it. The block reads the tree structure Moodle already stores, so no re-modelling is needed.
Available now
The Skills Dashboard is available now on edzlms, where it ships as part of the platform. It is also a standard Moodle block, so it can be installed on any Moodle site running 5.0 or later — if you already run your own Moodle, it does not require moving to ours.
It suits competency-based programmes of any shape, anywhere a framework nests skills under duty areas and learners need to see where they stand.
Want to see it against your own competency framework?
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