Skills Cloud Demystified

I will start by apologizing in advance for the number of times I use the word “skill;” just shy of 100 times in this post. They say you’re not supposed to use the word itself in explanation of its definition, but Workday makes that VERY difficult in the skill space because everything in and around this conversation is titled “skill this” and “skill that”.  So to have an impactful conversation in this space, let’s start by defining some of these “skill” terms before moving on to FAQs. We’re going to talk about the following:

Skills Cloud: Skills Cloud is Workday’s remote database of 200k+ skills. Which is GREAT for us because it provides a ton of options without a ton of work. Once enabled (robust step-by-step instructions can be found in community), all 200k+ Skills Cloud Skills become selectable by your workforce and reportable.  Skills can be placed on several additional objects in your tenant (job profiles, job requisitions, learning courses) and become a sort of connective tissue driving “suggestions” for career growth. Before Skills Cloud, there was only Maintained Skills and Crowdsourced Skills (more work and a messier dataset).

Skills Cloud Skills: We deserve a softball.  These are skills included in Workday’s Skills Cloud. Workday does not give us the specific, full list of what these are (discussed more in the FAQs section below). Workday does add Skills to the Skills Cloud on a regular cadence (also discussed more in the FAQs section below).

Tenanted Skills: Non-Skills Cloud Skills aka Maintained & Crowdsourced Skills. Folks will sometimes use Tenanted Skills and Maintained Skills synonymously. 

Maintained Skills: Skills that are selectable by your end-users that are not “technically” a part of Skills Cloud.  We can’t add skills to Workday’s Skills Cloud directly – but we can make custom additions in our tenant.  Something industry- or company- specific that isn’t included in Skills Cloud. Your end-users won’t notice the difference between a Maintained Skill and a Skills Cloud Skill.

Crowdsourced Skills: Any skill your end users type in manually if/when they can’t find what they’re looking for in the Skills Cloud or in your maintained list of Skills.  If you’re looking for a list of Crowdsourced Skills in your tenant, navigate to delivered report “Find Skill.”  I usually recommend turning this off.  As Skills Cloud balloons in size, the need for crowdsourcing becomes less and less.  And Crowdsourced Skills tend to make skill reporting and general data integrity…muddier.

Suggested Skills: Suggestions Workday will make of Skills it thinks you might have.  Skills Cloud leverages AI and Machine Learning, so from existing data-points (your position, job profile, work experience, learning transcript, etc.) it can infer & suggest potential skills.  If you click the little + icon next to a suggestion, it will be included in your skills; if you ignore these suggestions, nothing happens.

Skill Duplicates & Duplicate Management: If you have a maintained or crowdsourced skill that is the exact same as a skills cloud skills, skills cloud will “eat” them via a regularly scheduled series of background jobs.  Keeping just one version of that skill, the skills cloud version.  This keeps things tidy and prevents end-users from seeing multiple of the exact same values when they’re selecting skills.

Skill Synonyms & Synonym Skill Management: Similar to duplicate skill management, but with skill synonyms.  And this is “optional.”  It’s a little bit less clear what constitutes a “synonym” but if you do opt to turn this on, you can play defense for skills on your maintained list that you do not want to get eaten by skills cloud.

Skill Interests: A feature of the larger “Interests” functionality for workers that you’ll frequently see in Talent Reviews.  In addition to selecting skills you have, workers can select skills they would like to have via Skill Interests.  This plays a role in the Learning content that gets pushed to workers if skills are also indicated on courses.

That’s at least most of the frequent skill terms you’ll hear being tossed around. We know enough to be dangerous. We’ll revist additional skill terms in a later post, but lets move along to some quick FAQs!

Frequently Asked Questions about Skills Cloud

Does Skills Cloud cost extra money? Nope! But you do need to sign an Innovation Services Agreement (ISA) and enable the functionality in your tenant.

Can I add skills to the Skills Cloud? Technically no. Workday holds the keys to this kingdom and are the ones that make the call to add new skills to Skills Cloud. But you can add skills to your tenant (Maintained Skills) that live side-by-side with Skills Cloud Skills. The end-result is basically the same, but semantically that always feels important to clarify.

Can I see all the Skills in Skills Cloud? Unfortunately, no. Workday is very cloak & dagger about this. And that’s intentional. Skills Cloud is a Workday product that other competitors and providers would like to have their own versions of – so I can understand Workday not being interested in handing over this data set. If you asked me to sit down and compile a list of every skill I could think of, I don’t think I’d get anywhere near 10k let alone 200k.

Do new skills get added to the Skills Cloud? Yes! This is a little bit of a black-box but Workday has thresholds and criteria for adding skills into their skills cloud database using “data from public data sets, purchased data sets, and opted-in customer skills data.”  Do I know what this means specifically? No. But in theory if they see a maintained skill being used across multiple tenants by multiple users, they’ll consider adding it.

What’s on the Skill Horizon? Shrouded in a lot of safe harbor statements, there are two things I’m excited about in the realm of skills that I think are likely to come into existence. Skill Definitions and delivered Skill Categories.

I’ve hit my “skill” usage count for the day but we’ll be back with more skills content in the near future! If you’ve got a specific question, don’t hesitate to drop it below! And don’t forget to check out our post on the delivered Skills Dashboard!

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3 Quick Custom Performance Reports

Just three, you say?  There are, of course, more!  But the three below are the ones I build first and most frequently. As an added bonus, the build is very straight-forward.

You can certainly title these reports however you like, but I typically name them something in-and-around:

Performance Review Status

One quick caveat about this data source: it is indexed so if building in a non-production environment, the data it displays may lag slightly.  So if you are testing and don’t see the report populating the reviews you just launched, fear not! It will catch up.

How Do I Build It?

You will only need to fill in the Row Grouping section for this one with report field = Transaction Status. No Column Grouping required (unless you want to get fancy and inject another variable to see status by review template or company (or anything, really).

The Detail Data can be anything you’d like to see when you click on the blue numbers displaying in your report.  If you’re not sure, the fields pictured below are an excellent place to start!

No filters, no required prompts.  For the output, I like to go “Chart and Table” with a handy-dandy donut.  But if that’s not your style, you’ve got more output options to check out!

And voilà! You’ve got yourself a custom report on Performance Review Status.

Performance Review Step

How Do I Build It?

This is going to be very similar to the previous report. But instead of Transaction Status for our Row Grouping, we’re going to select “Business Process Step or To Do Awaiting Action (Includes Subprocesses).”  As an aside, I’ll create an Evaluate Expression Band calculated field here frequently to customize the output step name (mostly shortening things) which also allows us to leverage a sequence defined in Fields Values Group. But that’s likely content for a separate blog post, and is mostly for aesthetics.  The data will be the same.

No column grouping necessary but if you have multiple templates launched and would like to see your output broken down by step AND review template, feel free to add Review Template. We’ll wind up with an output that has multiple horizontal bars (pictured above, right) instead of one horizontal bar (pictured above, left)

Detail data continues to be whatever you’d like to see when you click on the blue numbers.  The filter tab will deviate slightly from the prior report; I like to only include Transaction Status of In Progress or Successfully Completed.  Technically, our canceled and rescinded transactions won’t be in a step.

For the output tab, you’ve likely noticed that this output is not a donut like our first report on status.  To add a little variety, I like to go with Bar – 100% to show the advancement through our business process.  If you went ahead and added a Column Grouping, that will be your vertical axis (review template) and the Legend will be our Row Grouping (business process step).  If you did not add a Column Grouping, the vertical axis will be “metrics.”

And just like that, we’ve got our second custom performance report!

Performance Review Rating Distribution

How Do I Build It?

For this report, our Row Grouping is going to be Overall Rating – Manager and our Column Grouping is going to be Review Template. Within the Summarization table, you can continue to do a “count” as we have done in our two previous reports, or you can add a percentage.

Our output is not a donut or a 100% bar, but rather a clustered column.  This will allow us to visually display an actual curve.

And there you have it. Three custom performance review reports to monitor your process and keep things running smoothly.

If you’re reporting needs extend beyond these three reports, don’t hesitate to reach out!  There is more where these came from!

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What’s Automatically Available in Talent 2024 R1?

A lot! Most of the Talent Optimization updates for 2024 R1 were automatically available! Let’s take a look at what should now be showing up in your Production tenant.

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Dynamic Talent Pool Membership

Workday’s now running a background process daily to update the membership of your dynamic talent pools.  You don’t have to do anything except expect more accurate membership in your dynamic talent pools. They’ve also thrown a membership count column into delivered report Talent Pools, and the ability to manually update membership if you need to see the latest-and-greatest right now.

Save Jobs to Career Hub Plan

Within Career Hub, end-users now can save Jobs to their Career Hub Plan like they can Mentors and Connections.

Gigs Rebrand to Flex Teams

The title “gigs” didn’t seem to represent the functionality behind it or help anyone discern what it was for.  “Flex Teams” will hopefully close that gap.  But, if you disagree and finally got your team used to the “gigs” verbiage, you can keep it via Custom Labels

Skills Miscellaneous Enhancements

The cap on the number of skills you can request ratings or endorsements for via Feedback has increased from 5 to 100.

Talent Miscellaneous Enhancements

• Gig Images: 8 new gig cover image options
• Career Hub for Mobile: Career Hub mobile improvements by allowing for filter and search on Browse All pages
• Employee Reviews Started Field: When viewing an employee review template, it now displays the number of employee reviews that have been initiated.
• Locked Feedback Template Warning: Workday no longer throws a warning when an end-user selects a locked-template to request feedback if all available templates are locked.
• Manager Insights Hub Security: Manager Insights Hub has added security configuration options for Suggested Opportunities.
• Manage Goals EIB: The Manage Goals web service can now leverage goal instances.

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Skills Dashboard

If you currently use Skills in Workday, or are considering it, this article is for you.  Workday has a delivered Skills Dashboard available for free in your Customer Central tenant’s Configuration Catalog.

Use it out of the box, or as a starting point for report customization.  Either way, I think this dashboard is valuable.  And did I mention – free?

Migrating from customer central can be a bit involved, so please reach out if you need assistance.  The Configuration Catalog Package is called “RPT Skills Dashboard.”  You will need to confirm the baseline dashboard security is compatible with whichever tenant you are migrating into.  For the initial migration, it involves Talent Administrator, Talent Partner, Manager, and Management Chain. You can, of course, adjust this security and any elements of the dashboard post-migration.

Included Reports

Workday’s delivered Skills Dashboard includes the following reports:

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Skills vs. Competencies

Fair warning – this is a big topic and there is a lot to unpack.  For the sake of brevity, I will focus on what I consider the larger, more-impactful decision points.  But this comes at the cost of a bit of nuance.

Skills & Competencies seem, colloquially, to be synonymous.  And some recent updates to functionality from Workday are moving Skills & Competencies towards each other (namely, the ability to rate & endorse Skills. My go-to line used to be that Competencies are rated, and Skills are not).  BUT it appears the intent here is to make the two options more complementary, as well as more individually robust.

When clients engage me for work with Skills Cloud, they are most frequently interested in better understanding the capabilities of their current workforce; what skills they presently have, and identifying any skill gaps. “What do we have, and what are we going to need?” Answering these questions will allow them to more accurately plan for sourcing needs in the future, and more effeciently recruit internally.

On the flip-side, when clients engage me for work with Competencies, the goal is usually to clearly communicate desired behaviors from the top down. “We’ve just revamped our Company/Executive/Department metrics and want individuals to put their focus in these areas because this is how we will measure success.” Less of a fact-finding effort, and more of an attempt at steering efforts towards identified priorities.

Skills

Perhaps most importantly, skills are self-reported, and their “scope” is smaller and more bite-sized compared to most competencies.  They reference, by and large, a specific ability. And that ability does not necessarily need to be related to their current job at all. Skills and the Skills Cloud leverage machine learning, and while you can rate skills via gigs, feedback, and self they do NOT pull in to performance reviews.

Competencies

Competencies have a bit more structure and control compared to skills; your organization defines them and dictates how they are assigned (job profile, job family, management level).  Usually, they are related to an individual’s role and represent a broader concept or more complex behavior than simple Microsoft Excel mastery. Competencies don’t get plugged into Machine learning and produce suggestions the way Skills do, but they can get directly pulled into performance reviews.

Separating Fact from Ficton

These two topics operate in similar spaces, and there is a lot of “newness” surrounding some of the functionality (particularly when it comes to Skills).  Likely for these reasons, there are a handful of assumptions floating around that are not (for the time being) accurate.  Let’s take a moment to dispel some of these misconceptions when it comes to the interplay (or lack thereof) of Skills vs. Competencies.

Touchpoints

What makes this head-to-head of functionality so interesting, and so complex, is that both Skills and Competencies have many cross-functional touchpoints.  The graphic below is not an exhaustive list, but gets the point across that these two objects each serve as a sort of connective tissue in the worker experience.

We’ve covered a bit about what uses Skills and Competencies were “intended” for, and how others leverage them. But the configuration options are flexible. If you find this framework doesn’t speak to you, or is not quite a good fit for your organization, you won’t be the first to deviate from the proverbial “best-practice” herd. Before you write off Skills or Competencies (or both) entirely, lets chat!

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Goals, Meet Competencies

One question we have been getting more frequently is, “are we able to connect goals with competencies?”

The answer is yes, which is great! What’s even better is that the set-up is quick & easy.  The task you will need is Configure Talent Tags.  Theres MORE Talent Tag functionality to cover here but for the purpose of this blog post, we just need to select the Competency Talent Tag in the Goals section drop-down.

Once we’ve done that, and assuming you have competencies configured, employees will now have a Relates To field within the Additional Details tab of their goals.  From here they can select multiple existing competencies to associate with an individual goal.

Any competencies selected to relate to a goal become reportable attributes on that goal; meaning, if you are interested in reporting on this connectivity across the organization, you can!

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What’s New with Goals?

The short answer? A lot! the 2023 R2 Workday® Updates AND the 2024 R1 Workday® Updates included enhancements to the Goal setting functionality within Talent Optimization for the first time in a while.

So what?

What’s the point? Workday® Goals are now much easier for end-users to interact with; fewer clicks, more intuitive actions, and the information you need front-and-center. Your internal team should get fewer goal-related questions, and there are more opportunities to customize the information you collect.

A walk down memory lane

Before we get into the details, let’s revist what the Workday® goal interface used to look like prior to the Goal User Experience Redesign. The UI was a bit dated and the Maintain Goal Setup task only allowed us to include or exclude goal elements, not optionally hide or require based on security.

What changed in 2023 R2?

In the 2023 R2 batch of updates, Workday® did the following:

• Overhauled the task Maintain Goal Setup to hide or require optional fields
• Introduced the “card” layout (akin to the People Experience homepage aesthetic)
• Bundled Individual Goals, Archived Goals, and Organizational Goals together into one Goals tab
• Replaced the general Edit button with more intuitive Create, Edit, and View options
• Introduced an icon for when a goal was locked

What changed in 2024 R1?

In the 2024 R1 batch of updates, Workday® did the following:

• Renamed Restore Goals to Unarchive Goals
• Added an Archive or Unarchive button
• Introduced side card pop-out functionality for viewing & editing goals
• Included Category on goal cards

Getting Started with the new Goal User Experience

This feature remains Opt-In (for now) but is automatically turned on in non-Production tenants. To enable in Production, navigate to Maintain Feature Opt-Ins and opt-in to the Goals User Experience Redesign Changes.

Once you do this, you should also update your profile group configuration for the Worker Profile > Performance section.  The new Goals tab combines what was previously two separate tabs for Individual Goals and Archived Goals.

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