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:

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:

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!

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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:

I’m going to ignore Externally Calculated Skill Levels for the moment.  This is a larger topic having to do with any existing 3^rd-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.

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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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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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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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