The Development lens is where you find the firm-wide skills story. Use it when you’re planning training, identifying coaching themes, or just trying to answer “what does this firm need to get better at?”.
What this page answers
What are the most common development areas across the cohort? Where are the strongest skills? Which departments have gaps in which capabilities?
What’s on the page
Development areas
A table of the top 15 primary development areas across the cycle. For each:
Development Area: the free-text label Compass produced
Count: how many employees had this as their primary area
% Cohort: that count as a percentage of all extracted reviews
This is your “what should we train on?” headline list. A development area that hits 20% of the cohort isn’t an individual problem — it’s a firm-wide need.
Top strengths
A lollipop chart of the top 15 strengths identified across the cycle. Compass extracts strengths as a list per review; this is the rolled-up cohort view.
The dual view (top strengths + top development areas) is useful for understanding what kind of firm you have right now: a firm where “client relationships” is a top strength and “strategic thinking” is a top development area looks very different from the reverse.
Skills matrix
A heatmap with departments down one axis and skill capabilities along the other. Each cell is colour-coded on a three-level scale:
Gap (red): this department needs work on this skill
Dev (amber): this department is developing in this skill
Strong (green): this department is strong here
The matrix is built from Compass’s skills signals — per-review extractions of which skills are being praised, which are flagged for development, and which are referenced neutrally.
Where the data comes from
All three widgets are populated from the review extraction job:
Each review is parsed for its primary development area (single value)
Each review is parsed for a strengths list
Each review contributes “skills signals” — what’s being said about which skills
The page then aggregates across the cohort: counts development areas, counts strengths, classifies department-skill cells based on the balance of positive vs negative signals.
How to read it
Don’t read the table as a verdict. Compass picked the wording — “presentation skills”, “presentations”, and “presenting” might all appear separately even if they’re the same thing. Group thematically when you summarise.
Use top strengths to celebrate. This is the firm’s “what we’re good at” — useful for marketing, recruiting, and morale.
Use the skills matrix to plan investment. Red cells in a department’s core competency are a problem; red cells in a peripheral competency are not.
Compare cycle-over-cycle. If a development area has been #1 for three cycles, your training programme isn’t working. If it disappears, something is.
Tips
Skills matrix coverage depends on review content. If your reviews don’t ask reviewers to talk about specific skills, Compass has less to extract — the matrix may look sparse. Richer reviews produce richer matrices.
The colours tell you the broad direction, not the story. To read the reviews behind a cell, filter the workspace to that department and dig in via the People lens.
This page is the strategic complement to the People lens. People is “who needs what?” — Development is “what does the cohort as a whole need?”.