What are Skills and how to use them?

In this article, you will learn what Skills are and how to use them.

What are Skills?

Skills are a fully adaptable framework that drives ownership of learning and gives managers a fair and clearly structured way to have development conversations with their teams. It also provides important insight into the distribution of skills within your business. Our skills module is focused on how skills tie in with the Learning, Engagement, and Performance of employees. Skills also provide users with a clear development journey through a skills framework mapped to their roles.

Skills are graded on the platform via a framework. This can be adapted to your specific platform needs.

How do I update the Skills framework?

In the top navigation bar, select your profile image > Click on Company settings > Select Learning Taxonomy > Click on Update Skills rating

You can edit/delete the prepopulated skills in the table and have up to 10 fields
Click Next

You can map out the relevant fields for the skill labels
Click Next

Once you’re happy with the results, click Done. You’ll receive a screen confirming the update of the skill ratings.

How do I add skills?

You can add skills to items as well as user profiles.

To add skills to new items:

On the completion page (step 3 of creator)-

You can search for and add the relevant skills for that item.
Click Next.
Complete the creator.
Once you’re happy with the results, click Done/Next. You’ll receive a screen confirming the creation of the skill(s) or the creator will close. The item will then be promoted to users who have the skill(s) you chose associated with their account.

To bulk import skills to existing items:

Step 1: Download the Bulk item CSV

In the top navigation bar, select your profile image > Click on Company settings > On the sidebar, select Imports > Click on Items update

Select Start items update > Click on Export bulk item CSV > Once it has loaded, select Download now

Step 2: Add the skills to the CSV

Once the file has been downloaded, open up the CSV > [find the item(s) that need updating] > Put relevant skills under respective column in the item row (be sure to use a comma to separate the various skills) > Save the file

Re-upload the file on the ‘upload CSV' page > click Start import

Step 3: Finalise your import

Go through the import process page to correct any flagged mistakes > click Done.

There are a couple of ways to add skills to existing user profiles:

In the top navigation bar, select your profile image > Click on your name > Select Skills > Click on Add topic
In the top navigation bar, select Assess > Click on Skills > Select My Skills > Click on Add here

Skills can be featured in the onboarding flow. This means that a user (logging onto the platform for the first time and setting up their account) will be prompted to add skills, so that they’ve got them as a basis to start from.

Skills can also be set via teams, groups, and even the company:

In the top navigation bar, select Assess > Click on Skills > Select Team > Click on Actions > Select Import topics

In the top navigation bar, select Assess > Click on Skills > Select Group > Click on Actions > Select Import topics

In the top navigation bar, select Assess > Click on Skills > Select Company > Click on Actions > Select Import topics

Always search for the skill before creating a new one to avoid duplicate skills

How do I use Skills?

Use Skills to discover skills gaps and define strategies to address them, using the platform’s aggregated skill insights
Use Skills to make data-driven decisions about squads, project teams, training, succession planning, and hiring
Update your Skills, see and compare skill ratings Use Skills as a dashboard widget to show a carousel of all widgets the user has and their individual ratings (this can be updated straight from the widget itself)

Use Skills to help your discover page recommend content related to your skills - discover page rotates up to three skill categories at a time to keep content fresh
The combined learner and manager skill ratings cultivate a shared understanding of development needs between teams

Some facts about Skills:

Skills overview shows the top-level statistics on the total skills rated across the company, the number of skills ratings that have been submitted, the average skill rating, and an analytics graph showing the skills frequency and skills distribution across the company

Users can see all the skills they have on their profile, their own rating, as well as, their manager’s rating with the option to update the rating