Skills Touchpoints & Suggestions

For part 2 of our skills cloud series, we’re going to cover the main cross-functional touch-points for Skills, and how it drives different suggestions. 

The Skills touch-points we’ll cover are in the realms of Talent, Learning, Recruiting, and HCM.  Most suggestions will be of skills themselves in different places on different objects, but Workday ALSO has the ability to suggest Colleagues, Learning Content, and Job Opportunities (aka Job Requisitions & Flex Teams).

Below we’ve summarized what Workday can suggest and where:

One example I like to use when talking about Skills Cloud, machine learning, and AI is Spotify (apologies to my Apple Music listeners). Spotify can push to their users any artists that they already listen to; simple and straight-forward. Spotify can also push songs & artists from the same or similar genres as the music their users listen to.  Still straight-forward, but there’s a little bit of inference involved here. The fancy thing Spotify can do (which has been pretty accurate, in my experience) is identify other listeners with similar music tastes to you and suggest songs that THEY like.  The connection is a bit more difficult to track since we don’t have access to all this data in bulk (nor perhaps the processing power to analyze it) but the resulting suggestions can be impressively accurate.

Loosely, Workday’s suggestions are doing something similar.  Workday is looking at all the data at its disposal and making straight-line or dotted-line connections from object to skill or object to object.  It’s just a bit more fun to talk about in terms of music.

Let’s dive into some of the places skills can show up, and the role they can play in the larger picture. As an aside, I’ll intermittently call out decisions we can make around skill functionality; by-and-large that decision is a check box in Maintain Skills and Experience Setup.

Talent

Lets start with the most well-known one.  Skills on a worker. Individuals can select skills they have, or skills they would like to have.  The songs on your playlist, if you will.

At this point, Workday can begin to identify other workers that are “similar” to you based on the skills that they have and are interested in.  Workday can also reference objects like job profiles and supervisory organizations when looking for similarities.

Via the Connections & Mentors functionality (pictured below in Career Hub) Workday can create dotted-line connections between workers.  Workers that are similar to you or workers that have something you want. This one is a slightly different suggestion of People rather than Skills.

Learning

The suggestions on Learning Content are two-fold.  Within the Skills drop-down is a category of Recommended Skills where Workday will make suggestions of Skills to include on this content.  In addition, Workday can also take this Learning Content and suggest it to Learners based on their interests and learning behavior.

Recruiting

When you apply internally, applicants can leverage skills cloud & skill suggestions in much the same way they do on their worker profile.  Optionally, an internal applicant can update the skills on their worker profile with any changes they’ve made in their job application so these two places remain in sync (this capability is new-er).

External applicants function a little differently with regards to skills.  You can optionally allow skills cloud to be accessible to your external candidates, but it won’t make skill suggestions (I assume because Workday doesn’t have much data on them at this point). The value in opening up skills cloud to external candidates (in excess of clean data and seemingly unlimited skill selection options) is that upon hire this information transfers over to a new hire’s worker profile.

Add required and optional skills directly to your job requisitions & flex teams (gigs) for clarity on the role, and direct influence in how it is promoted to applicants.  If a worker has skills that this job requisition/flex team professes to need, it’s more likely to be pushed to them as an opportunity that matches their skill set.  In absence of direct skills applied, Workday can leverage the free-text descriptions and/or job profiles to make skill inferences.

HCM

At this point, it’s becoming clear that we can sprinkle skills in A LOT of different places.  The final object we will cover is Job Profiles.  For Job Profiles, the information lives amidst other Qualifications, and you can add additional skill data for Required vs. Optional and Skill Level (more on Skill Levels to come in our Skills part 3 post).

If you want to add skills to Job Profiles in bulk, this effort has recently become MUCH easier. This will likely be it’s own Skills post, but the involved parties are the delivered report Suggested Skills for Job Profile and the mass action Edit Skills for Job Profiles.

There is so much to cover within the realm of skills.  I hope this overview has left you with more clarity and fewer questions.  If that’s NOT the case, or if you have suggestions for the next deep-dive skills topic, don’t hesitate to drop a comment in the link below!

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