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Measuring Skills

Measuring Skills

When Skills Cloud first arrived on the scene, there was one component Workday users were left wanting: the ability to in some way measure “how much” of a skill someone had.  Workday listened and has been steadily adding features to do just that.  Here we’ll talk about what those features look like.

Bear in mind, if you have no interest in adding numbers & validation to skills, you don’t have to! There is plenty to do with Skill Cloud without injecting skill leveling.

Initial Setup

If you are interested in ratings/measurements for skills, theres a bit of setup involved. Unsurprisingly, security plays a role. The two domains specific to Skill Levels that you’ll want on your radar are Person Data: Skill Level and Self-Service: Skill Level.

If you navigate to task Maintain Skill Level Setup you will see Workday’s delivered 5-point scale (plus a bonus N/A).  You can override the below titles & descriptions to customize, but for one reason or another we are stuck with the 5-point scale. This will be the baseline for Skill Assessments/Skill Ratings that the Employee can self-assess and request from others.

There are presently 3 places where you can source skill ratings:

Self-Assessment

Requested Feedback Ratings

Externally Calculated Skill Levels

I’m going to ignore Externally Calculated Skill Levels for the moment.  This is a larger topic having to do with any existing 3rd-Party Skill measurements you might currently have. We can load those values into Workday (via a delightful trio of EIBs).  Don’t hesitate to drop a comment if you want that deeper dive into Externally Calculated Skill Levels, but I shall proceed with assuming this is not the case for us.

This skill level calcuclation is going to influence the math on what we see as the “overall” rating for a skill. 

Regardless of the Skill Level Calculation you choose, Workday has provided a “Skill Level Breakdown” within this view to show end-users what math is occuring. Increased transparency and all that good stuff.

With that being said, let’s take a look at where these numbers are coming from.

Skill Self-Assessments

The skills self-assessment UI will optionally allow a worker to rate themselves from 1 to 5 on each of their selected skills. The strange thing here is that “Assess My Skills” is not a searchable, stand-alone task.  Universally – you’ll be able to update your Self-Assessment (on a one-by-one basis) from the same landing page that you can see the Overall Rating.

For Self-Assessment of Skills in bulk, it will differ depending on whether or not you have Career Profile enabled.  If it is enabled, it will be it’s own tab called “Assess My Skills.”

If you don’t currently have Career Profile enabled, you can access Assess My Skills via “Edit Skills.”

Requested Feedback Ratings for Skills

There are two different “styles” of skill feedback you can request from others.  We can ask them to rate our skills on the same 1 to 5 scale that we used for our Self-Assessment.  Or we can ask them to acknowledge the presence of that skill through an endorsement. 

For both options, we will need to create a unique feedback template that tells Workday what action we will be asking our feedback providers to perform.

When an employee goes to request feedback – it is at this point that they will select to collect Skill Ratings or Skill Endorsements and on which skills.

For the feedback provider, the requests for skill ratings or skill endorsements will look like the below:

Once the feedback is provided, both skill ratings and endorsements can be visible within the Feedback card on the worker profile summary and within the Feedback for Skills tab.

While it may feel like the sources for skill ratings are, at the moment, limited, I do anticipate future release cycles adding to this list beyond requested feedback and self-assessments. I will leave you with two final call-outs: 1. Keep in mind – Skill-Leveling is something additional we can do with skills but it is optional. We can still leverage Skills Cloud and not use it. 2. Self-Assessment can sometimes be confused with steps in the Performance Review. They are not the same thing. Skills, for the time being, cannot be assessed as a part of your performance review cycle.