Where it came from
Kunska did not start as a product idea. It started as a problem its founder had already spent years solving by hand.
Henning Kjær has decades of experience leading technical teams, and built the Tech Academy at a major Danish company — a programme that supported the growth of more than 400 developers and technical staff. Running something at that scale teaches you exactly where competency development falls apart: not in the intent, but in the administration. Spreadsheets go stale, skills matrices are rebuilt from scratch every year, and the conversation about what someone wants to learn happens once and is never referred to again.
The platform is the tool that was missing.
Onboarding that seeds the matrix
When someone creates an account they state three things: the skills they have, the strengths they are best at, and what they want to learn.
Those three lists are not a welcome-survey that gets discarded. They seed everything downstream. When the user later joins a competency matrix, it is pre-populated automatically — strengths land at expert level, skills at proficient, and learning goals appear as growth targets. All three lists stay editable from profile settings, so the picture stays current instead of ossifying at the moment of signup.
This is the design decision the whole product hangs off. The reason skills matrices die is that filling one in is tedious and the payoff is invisible. Seeding the matrix from something the user has already told you removes most of that first cost.
Teams first, organisations only if you need them
The team is the primary unit. You create one, invite people by email — an invitee without an account can sign up straight from the invitation — and build a matrix together. The creator is the owner; owners and admins invite people, change roles, and create matrices and sessions, while members view and participate.
Organisations are an optional layer above that, for people running several teams. They let skills roll up across teams and departments to nest into a company hierarchy. Optional is the important word: a single team does not need one and is never made to create one.
That restraint is deliberate. Most tools in this category assume an enterprise org chart on day one, which makes them unusable for the eight-person team that would benefit most.
One scale, defined once
Skills are named by the people who hold them, in their own words — there is no taxonomy to learn first and no manager rating twelve people from memory. What is fixed is the scale. Every cell in a Kunska matrix uses the same five levels, None, Beginner, Competent, Proficient and Expert, with the names from the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition and the definitions borrowed from the ILUO matrix used for cross-training in lean manufacturing. Each level is something you could watch a person do: Competent does it alone on routine work, Proficient handles the unusual cases and others rely on them, Expert sets the standard and teaches it.
The definitions are what stop this becoming a numbers exercise. "Level 3 in testing" means nothing on its own and invites people to rate themselves by confidence rather than evidence. The same words in every cell turn the same rating into a conversation two people can have without arguing about what the number meant — and a skill someone wants to learn can sit in the matrix unrated, as a growth target.
Market of Skills
The differentiator is Market of Skills: an interactive, facilitated session format where a team shares knowledge, gives feedback, and identifies growth opportunities together. A session starts from the team's page — the roster is the team, so there is no code to type and nobody to invite by hand — and the facilitator moves the room from stage to stage while everyone's screen follows.
This is what separates the platform from a generic HR skills tracker. A tracker records the state of a team's skills for somebody else to read. A facilitated session is the event where the team actually looks at that data together and decides what to do about it — which is the part that produces change, and the part software usually leaves out.
A session runs in four stages. Everyone opens a booth with three lists: the skills they offer the team, the ones they are less sure of, and the ones they want to learn. Each person then presents their booth while the others give feedback of three kinds — glad you offer that, you also have this, I can help you with that. The team reflects together on what the booths showed, and the results merge into the competency matrix: To Sell becomes Proficient, May Be becomes Competent, To Buy becomes a growth target, and a skill a teammate spotted is added too.
From the matrix to a plan
That is where a Market of Skills session ends. The results page sums up what the session produced, and the team chooses which skills and ratings to merge into its matrix. Nothing is removed or lowered.
The matrix is live for everyone on the team, and it reads itself: a skill only one person holds at Proficient or above is a single point of failure, a skill nobody could teach has no Expert yet, and a learning goal in the same column as a colleague's Expert is a mentoring pair waiting to happen. A matrix nobody has touched for two months is flagged as going stale.
From there Kunska writes the plans. Each person can generate a personal development plan from their own three lists, and a team lead can generate a team plan from the whole matrix — strengths, where to focus, who could learn from whom and a timeline — as branded PDFs for a one-to-one or a planning meeting. The plans name the learning tools the team has recorded, so a suggested course points at something the team already has. Kunska is free for teams, with three AI-written plans a month; Pro lifts that cap for the person who writes them.
The platform is live at kunska.com, under its own name since the 2026 rebrand. It is the clearest example on this site of what we mean by building from domain expertise rather than from a feature list — the product exists because the person who designed it had already run the process manually, at scale, and knew which parts genuinely mattered.
In production
Kunska runs as a service for many teams at once, which means every boundary in it has to hold: a team's matrix is visible to that team, an organisation sees only its own teams, and an invitation link opens one door. Those are the first things the readiness review looks at in any app, because they are the first things that fail in apps built fast, and this is where we learned to look for them.
It also carries the unglamorous parts a prototype never has: accounts people can recover, exports for the stakeholder who will never log in, and a rebrand in 2026 that had to move a live product to a new name without breaking a single link.
Highlights
- Live team skills matrix on one five-level scale
- Market of Skills sessions run in the browser
- AI-written development plans as PDFs, from the matrix
- Secure, scalable AWS backend
Everything we check on your web app, we have had to get right on these. See how the readiness review and launch work, or what each day costs.