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A Walkthrough of Your Different Skills Fields

Any time you add a skill, you’ll be asked to fill out a number of fields that will later help you organize your skills and group certain skills together. These fields are as follows:

  • Skill Name 
  • Skill Type 
  • Skill Category 
  • Assign a Rating from 1-5 
  • Expires (Yes/No)
  • Roles 
  • Description

When you fill out these fields in your ADD SKILL window, they’ll appear as fields on your skill list.

Each field tracks a different detail about your skills, so this article will go into depth about what these fields mean and how you can fill them out.

 

Skill Name

As the name suggests, the SKILL NAME field is for you to add the name you’ll use to refer to your skill. It’s a required field, so you won’t be able to add your skill unless you fill it out.

 

Skill Type

The SKILL TYPE field is a way for you to designate the kind of skill you’re adding. When you click the GRAY ARROW, you’ll be able to pick the type of skill you’re adding from a dropdown picklist with the following options: SKILL, CERTIFICATION, LANGUAGE or OTHER. If, say, you want to detail that a staffer is fluent in Spanish, you could add Spanish as a skill and make Language the skill type. If a staffer has completed a specific course and received a certification, the skill type field would allow you to account for that certification. This is also a required field.

 

Skill Category

This field is another place where you can differentiate the type of skill you’re adding. The SKILL CATEGORY field allows you to more broadly define the umbrella under which your skill falls. For instance, if you’re adding Recruiting as a skill, you could mark it down under a Human Resources skill category. The categories that appear in the SKILL CATEGORY picklist are pulled from the ones you create in your FIELD VALUES window – read this article to learn about skills-specific field values and how to add your own. 

 

Assign a Rating from 1-5 for this skill

If you want to be able to assign a skill level or rating to one of your skills, you can check this box. Later, you’ll be able to assign a skill rating when you add a skill to the SKILLS tab of a staffers settings window. These skills ratings will appear as stars, which mark a staffers proficiency level at the skill in question. In the example below, we’ve ranked Charlie Brown’s skill rating for Project Management as four stars.

 

Expires (Yes/No)

This field allows you to choose whether the skill you’re adding expires or is time sensitive. This makes the most sense if you’re adding a certification that needs to be renewed after a certain period of time. Choosing YES for this field will show whether that certification is approaching it’s expiration date, letting you know you may need to remind a staffer to renew their certification. 

 

Roles

This field lets you select a staffer role that you’d like your skill to be applied to. When you choose a role type from this field’s picklist, then any staffer you assign to that role will automatically also be assigned that skill. For example, if you create a Public Speaking skill and add Project Manager in the role field, then any staffer who is made Project Manager in their staffer settings will automatically also immediately have the Public Speaking skill. Similar to the SKILL CATEGORY field, the options that appear in this field’s picklist match the roles you add to the TEAM ROLE tab of your FIELD VALUES window. To learn how to add roles to your firm, read this article. 

 

Description

The DESCRIPTION field is the last field you’ll see in your ADD SKILL window. If there are additional details about your skill that you’d like to add, but that aren’t reflected in any of the other fields, you can add them to the DESCRIPTION field. This field allows you to write full sentences to fill out any extra information about your skill. 

 

Number of Staff

An additional and final field in your skill list is the NUMBER OF STAFF field. This field isn't editable from your ADD SKILL window because its values are determined by the number of staffers you've assigned to each skill. When you add this field to your skill list, you'll see a hyperlinked number next to each skill, so long as you've already assigned that skill to at least one staffer. If a skill hasn't yet been assigned to any staffers, this field will remain blank. The numbers in the NUMBER OF STAFF column will be hyperlinked. Clicking on one of these hyperlinks will open a pop-up window where you'll see the names of the staffers who have that skill. You'll also see hyperlinks you can follow to MANAGE SKILLS for each staffer. 

 

Curious to learn more about skills matching? Check out some of these articles:

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