If you run a trade company and you care about retaining and tracking your talent, you've probably got a spreadsheet somewhere with every employee down the side and every applicable skill across the top. Each quarter someone sits down with the foremen, re-grades the matrix, and figures out who deserves a raise. That spreadsheet is your training program.
It mostly works. But it's also the reason it takes so many years to develop a fully capable trade worker. There's no defined path from raw labor to journeyman, so progress is whatever the foreman remembers on the day of the review.
Wages drift away from skill and end up tied to who asked for a raise and who's been there longest.
Employees can't answer the only question they actually care about, which is what they need to do to make more money.
Our client had decades of experience as a high-end custom concrete contractor, and they had developed a sophisticated system to retain and train their talent. After running this system on spreadsheets, they were referred to us to build it into an app.
We built SkillStacker to fix this problem. Once it was running, it became clear that other trade companies had the same problem on their hands, so we worked with our client to turn it into a SaaS that they could sell to other companies.
The core: levels, skills, and certifications
Every company that signs up gets its own tenant with strict data isolation. They can invite their employees, creating a training program and wage plan, and quickly visualize the skillset of their team.
Companies configure their divisions, what roles are in their divisions, and what levels and skills their team can progress through.
A level is a stage in the program, each with its own set of skills attached. A skill is a discrete capability like form setup or concrete finishing, rated 0 to 4 with decimals.
A 4 means mastery, and mastery triggers a wage bump. A typical company has 50+ skills spread across its levels. When an employee scores a 4 on every skill in their current level, they advance automatically to the next one.
Certifications sit alongside the level system. They're external credentials like OSHA or ADA ramp, with optional expiration dates and their own wage bumps.
Hour wage thresholds add a third dimension: hit 1,500 cumulative hours at a given level and pick up another bump. An employee's wage is their starting wage plus the sum of every bump they've earned across all three sources, plus any manual adjustments an admin has applied.
The wage math
On paper, the wage math sounds straightforward. In practice, two rules make the systems engineering more complicated.
The first is level-gating. A 4 on a higher-level skill does not pay until the employee actually reaches that level. If a Level 2 laborer happens to crush a Level 4 skill ahead of schedule, the score is recorded but the wage bump sits dormant. The same applies to hour thresholds. Certifications are the one exception: they pay immediately, because an OSHA card is an OSHA card regardless of where you are in the program.
This means you can’t simply calculate a wage by looking at what the employee has achieved so far.
The second rule is the delay system. Anything achieved in quarter N applies to wages in quarter N+2. A skill mastered in Q1 (January through March) shows up in the paycheck starting in Q3. Companies can choose different delay amounts or opt out of delays entirely, applying each wage bump immediately when a skill or certification is achieved.
Then you need to consider the possibility of changes and regressions. What happens if an employee starts losing a skill they previously had? Or if a new skill is added to a level they had previously achieved?
Each of these edge cases is handled by the system and surfaced to the user when relevant, so they can make informed choices. Our client struggled to keep track of all this math and scheduling in spreadsheets, but now they can focus on running their business and evaluating their employees instead of tracking minutiae.
Visibility into your team
One of the benefits of SkillStacker is gaining visibility into the team without having to store everything in your head. You can use it to identify strengths and weaknesses in the team, figure out what certifications need to be pursued, and schedule teams for jobs based on expertise levels.
The certifications matrix shows an overview of certifications, making it easy to determine gaps and which ones need to be renewed.
On the employee side, the home dashboard answers the question “What’s next for me?” Current level, current wage, upcoming quarter wage, the skills they need to work on at their current level, an expandable view of every future skill, etc.
Migrating from Bubble.io to code
We initially created SkillStacker as an MVP in Bubble.io, a platform that allows you to build apps without code. Before agentic coding, it was the best option for an MVP.
The Bubble version got us to a working product fast, but the limited UI customization created problems for where we wanted to take the product, so we rebuilt the whole thing from scratch on Next.js and Convex.
We’ve developed a reusable utility which helps us take an exported Bubble.io app configuration and use it to very quickly rebuild with Next.js, so we can move Bubble apps into code quickly and improve them in the process.
Where SkillStacker goes from here
The client is setting up a pilot program for companies to test drive the system at a reduced rate. If you’re interested in trying SkillStacker, click here to read more about it.
Concrete is the primary market because that's where the problem was clearest first. But the model extends to any trade like carpentry, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, landscaping. People leave their companies for many reasons, but one of the primary reasons is that they don’t see how they can progress further.
"SkillStacker was built to fix a workforce problem we'd been dealing with for 30 years in concrete. The vision was clear, but the technical path wasn't. Nuance took our problems, goals, and contractor logic and turned them into a real product. No tech degree required on our end. They ask the right questions and deliver. That's hard to find." – Dave Johnson, Owner, Custom Concrete Contracting.
How we can help you
If you’re reading this article because you’re interested in creating your own custom software, reach out with any questions you have or set up a call with us! Whether you’re looking to build a brand-new SaaS company or just need an internal tool that works the way you do, we can help.
If you’re reading because you’re interested in using SkillStacker in your business, click here to visit their website.