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Where Can I Put Competencies?

Where Can I Put Competencies?

If your organization is gearing up to introduce or revamp competencies, you’ve stumbled upon this article at the exact right time.  There are no “right” and “wrong” ways to organize your competencies, per se, but there are certainly easier vs. harder ways when it comes to Workday.  And it all has to do with which objects Workday lets us place competencies on.

The objects are:

Job Profiles

Job Families

Management Levels

Review Templates

In this post, we’ll start with a refresher on what competencies are and their capabilities as an object in Workday.  Then we move into the exciting part; where we can place competencies and how we can use this knowledge to make our lives easier.

As a quick aside and shameless plug, we’ve discussed competencies here before specifically in comparison to skills (Skills vs. Competencies). Click on over if that peaks your interest.

What are Competencies?

A structured and controlled way for organizations to highlight and define behaviors that they care about and want to use to drive performance. The organization dictates what competencies, defined in what way, get assigned to what cohort of employees. Competencies frequently will get pulled into employee performance reviews and receive a rating assessment.

Now, if your organization uses the same set of competencies for the entire population, you catch a break! The assignment of these competencies is straight-forward, with the easiest being hardcoding them into your performance review. 

However, if different employee populations are assessed on different sets of competencies, there are strategy options for how we deliver the right competencies to the right employees. 

What Do We Stand to Gain?

Two things, transparency and efficiency.  Let’s say we place clearly defined competencies on our job profiles or management levels.  That information makes expectations for end-users that much clearer.  I always prefer to know what I’m supposed to be doing before I’m supposed to be doing it.  And efficiency. How we organize our competencies could be the difference between a single Year-End performance review template and ten.

Where Could I Put Competencies?

Job Profiles

Navigate to task Edit Job Profile > Qualifications > Competencies to include Competencies directly on a job profile. You have the option to indicate if the competency is required or optional, and select a target rating. IF you have competencies placed on objects associated with this job profile, you will see those listed in the “Competencies from Other Sources” section.

Job Families

Navigate to task Maintain Competencies for Job Family and select which Job Family.  You will have the same options to indicate if a competency is required vs. optional and select a target rating.

Management Levels

This may begin to feel repetitive. BUT. Navigate to task Maintain Competencies for Management Level and select which Management Level.  You guessed it! You can add your competencies and optionally indicate if it is required and pick a target rating. 

Review Templates

If we can successfully organize our competencies based on Job Profile, Job Family, or Management Level, we can “pull from position” within our performance reviews.  In this way, employees can receive the same performance review template that auto populates with different competencies (that are pulled from their position aka job profile, job family, or management level).

If we CANNOT do this, hardcoding competencies onto performance review templates is our fail-safe option. All we’d need to do is identify the right cohort for each unique competency set via template eligibility rules. The downside here is more review templates; we’ll need a unique template for each unique competency set.

As an added bonus, if you include the Competencies tab somewhere within the Worker Profile, employees can see their delivered competencies and any applicable target / assessed ratings.

As we wrap up, it’s worth noting that your organization does not have to use competencies at all – plenty of folks don’t. But if you do, and it’s possible to organize competencies along the lines of Job Profiles, Job Families, or Management Levels, it does make ongoing maintenance easier within Workday.

Add Skills to Job Profiles in Bulk

Add Skills to Job Profiles in Bulk

Continuing within our Workday Skills Cloud series, here we are going to deep-dive into placing Skills on Job Profiles in bulk via Mass Action.  We’ll cover what it looks like, the steps to do it, and why we should even bother in the first place.

Why Bother?

Better Suggestions: Nothing will “break” if you don’t place skills on Job Profiles.  But it will make suggestions within the system more accurate.  Take it as an opportunity to better inform Workday and remove some of the guesswork.  Workday can infer what Skills are involved for this job profile based on free text descriptions and other associated details, OR you could tell Workday specifically what Skills are involved. This impact spreads to any of the suggestions that Workday is making referencing a Job Profile as an input (Ex: Skills a worker might have, Skills to put on a job requisition).

Transparency: Workday’s AI and Machine Learning is not the only thing looking at your job profiles.  Your workforce is too!  From recruiting to career growth, increasing specificity on your job profiles will only increase the accuracy with which roles are advertised, pursued, and staffed.

Add Skills to Job Profile via Mass Action

Our first stop needs to be to Maintain Skills and Experience Setup to confirm we’ve checked the box to Populate Suggested Skills for Job Profiles

This will allow our second stop, delivered report Suggested Skills for Job Profiles to do the thing we need it to do — suggest skills!  Prior to this report, we were on the hook to come up with all the skills we wanted to place on all our job profiles.  Which was inevitably always a herculean effort. But no longer!

We’ll have the option to run this report for all Job Profiles, or a specific subset of job profiles based on Job Family, Job Family Group, or selected individually.

This report gives us three styles of skill suggestions with logic that is easy to track:

Suggestions based on text blocks within the Job Profile itself

Suggestions based on text blocks from associated job requisitions

Suggestions based on skills assigned to associated job requisitions

It is this report that we are technically plugging into our mass action.  We will run the task Launch Mass Action Event and populate our prompts:

Mass Action = Edit Skills for Job Profiles

Report = Suggested Skills for Job Profiles

You will have the option to run this task for all job profiles or a smaller subset.  Want to go rogue and add skills that didn’t show up in the Suggested Skills for Job Profiles report? You can! Feel free to add required or optional skills at will, just be careful when doing custom additions in bulk, the skills you select will appear on all the job profiles involved.

Remember those three styles of skill suggestions our Suggested Skills for Job Profiles report was returning?  You can specify which style, and how many skills from each style you would like to add.  That report will only return a max of 10 from each style, and if I select 5 it will be the first 5. 

Once we hit OK, Workday will launch a background process that generates our Mass Action Workbook.  We are almost done folks, I promise. Within our mass action Workbook we can confirm our displayed data looks as it should, troubleshoot any errors, and click Validate All. 

The final button to press will be Submit and just like that, all of our Job Profile Skills dreams have come true!

Skills Touchpoints & Suggestions

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

Worker Skills

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.

Connections & Mentors

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

Learning Content

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

Internal Candidate Skills

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 Candidate Skills

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.

Job Requisitions & Flex Teams

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

Job Profiles

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!

Question? Comment?