Skills - Skills 101 – Kallidus

The Skills functionality in Learn and Perform helps organisations define, manage, and develop the capabilities of their workforce.

With Skills in Learn, you can create and manage a skills framework, tag learning content with relevant skills, and assign skills to users. You can also define skill levels for your users, which can be self assessed and approved by managers, or automatically boosted upon completion of a Lesson.

Learners can track and manage their skills from their Skills dashboard.

In Perform, you can link a development activity to a skill you've been assigned and even get AI recommended suggestions for skills focused development activities.

In this article we will cover:

Creating and managing Skills
Tagging Lessons with Skills
Mapping your Skills to people using Skill profiles
Setting up Skill levels
Skill level changes
Skills in Perform

Creating and managing Skills

Once you have permission to create and manage Skills, you have two methods of creating Skills: creating them using AI or importing your own list. You can continue to add skills into your library using either method over time.

Creating Skills using AI

This method allows you to quickly generate a tailored list of skills, based on information you provide about your organisation and the type of skills you want to generate. You will be asked if you want to generate company-wide skills or job-specific skills. If you select job specific skills, you'll have the option to add these to a new or existing skills profile ready to be assigned out to users.

Read Creating Skills using AI to find out more.

Importing a list of Skills

This option allows you to import a list of Skills as a CSV to your library through a CSV file. This is a great option if you have already defined some or all of the skills you need in your organisation.

Read Importing your own list of Skills to find out more.

Tagging Lessons with Skills

Lessons can be tagged with Skills from your skills library, which are visible to the learner on the Course or Pathway view, as well as their Skills Dashboard if they have been assigned that skill. There are two methods of tagging Lessons with Skills: using AI to bulk assign and manually assigning.

Using AI to bulk assign Skills to Lessons

This method uses the Lesson description to identify relevant Skills from your library and will suggest relevant skills. It is important to ensure your lesson descriptions are complete to allow the AI to correctly identify the correct Skills. Up to 20 Lessons can be tagged at a time and you can add and remove suggested Skills before finalising.

Read Bulk tag Lessons with Skills using AI to find out more.

Manually tagging Skills to Lessons

From a Lesson, you can directly assign Skills from your library.

Read Tag Lessons manually with Skills to find out more.

Mapping your Skills to people using Skill profiles

Skills profiles allow you to assign a group of Skills out to users. They allow you to categorise your skills and to flexibly assign Skills to your people, as learners can be assigned multiple Skills profiles. For example, your different profiles may cover:

Core skills relevant to all employees
Department-specific skills applicable to an entire team
Job-specific skills tailored to a particular role
Leadership skills for managers and aspiring leaders

This allows your to assign groups of skills to relevant groups of people.

Skills Dashboard

When a Learner has been assigned Skills, their Skills dashboard will become visible. Some things to note about the Skills dashboard:

Learners' skills will be visible alongside the skills profile/s that the skill has been assigned through.
A Learner can be assigned a Skill through multiple profiles and all will be visible.
If a Learner is assigned a skill directly, this will appear as a 'General skill'.

Creating a Skill profile

Skills profiles can be created by adding Skills from your library manually or using AI suggestions. Read Create and edit a Skill profile and Populate Skill profiles using AI suggestions to find out more.

Skill profiles can also be created at the same time as generating job-specific skills for your library using AI.

Setting up and using Skill levels and targets

Skill levels are a great way to identify skill gaps that are impacting performance - both individually and company-wide - and to set clear expectations about required proficiencies to be successful in a role.

Setting up Skill levels

By default, all skills use a simple 'Achieved' or 'Not achieved' status. This makes it easy to track skills and spot gaps without adding extra complexity. Alternatively, you can define up to 7 custom Skill levels.

Skill levels are universally applied to all skills. This means that all skills for all users will have the same number of skill levels, with the same labels and descriptions. You will need to ensure that your Skill levels and their descriptions apply for all Skills and users in your organisation.

Read How to set up skill levels to find out more.

Updating and deleting Skill levels

Skill level names and descriptions can be updated in Global settings. It is also possible to delete Skill levels, however this risks unlinking Skills from your content, profiles and learners.

Read Editing and deleting skill levels to find out more.

Setting Skill level targets

Skill level targets can be given to groups of learners through a Skill profile, which will be visible from their Skills dashboard. They allow you to define the level of proficiency a learner should aim to achieve for a particular skill, helping to guide development and track progress.

Read Setting skill level targets to find out more.

Skill level changes

There are two ways in which a learner can change their Skill level: requesting a Skill level change for their manager to approve and being auto-boosted to a higher Skill level by completing a Lesson or Pathway Milestone that has auto-boosting switched on for that skill.

Requesting and approving Skill level changes

Self-assessing skill levels is a valuable practice that promotes self-awareness, helps identify growth opportunities, and supports career development by encouraging individuals to reflect on their strengths and areas for improvement.

Learners can request a Skill level change from their skills dashboard. This will notify their manager, who will be able to approve the request.

Read Self-assess Skill levels by requesting and approving changes to find out more.

Auto-boosting Skill levels

Automatic skill boosting is a way to automatically update a Learner's skill level when they complete a relevant lesson, pathway milestone or are signed off after a competency check.

Read Automate skill progression using auto boosting to find out more.

Skills in Perform

Linking Skills to development activities.

Skills can be linked to development activities in Perform created by either the learner or their manager. Once the development activity has been completed, the option to request a Skill level change will appear.

Read Create a Development activity (personal goal) for yourself and Create a development activity (personal goal) for a team member to find out more.

Using AI-Recommended Development Activities for Skills

Users with a skills profile will have development activities suggested to them based on their biggest skills gap.

This focused suggestion encourages people to raise their biggest skills gaps first - the skills with the biggest difference in skill level between where they are and their target level for that skill.