What are skills?

Skills are a great way of validating and developing competencies or capabilities within your organisation. Skills are available in both Totara Learn and Totara Perform.

If you have Totara Learn only then you will not have some of the extended capabilities of skills, but you will have the ability to use skills with learning plans.

If you have Totara Perform only then you will not be able to use skills with learning plans, as this feature is only available with Totara Learn. However, you will have access to some extended skill features including skill profile, skill assignments, and achievement paths.

If you have both multitenancy and tenant isolation enabled then skills will not be available for your site's users.

Upskilling

By identifying skills gaps you can target skills at particular individuals, positions or other groups of users to upskill your existing staff. By focusing on improving your existing workforce, you can:

• Respond to market changes

• Improve employee engagement

• Offer career development

• Increase talent retention

• Boost revenue and profitability

Working with skills

Within Totara you can use skills to map skills to people, and then map skills to various forms of achievement, including courses, other skills and manual ratings (when a user or manager rates a skill level).

Additionally if you have Totara Perform then by setting up achievement paths you can decide how skills are achieved. With Totara Perform you can also set different achievement requirements for each rating of a skill. For example, a user could be automatically given the 'Competent with supervision' based on their assignment to the skill for holding a certain position - as you might assume this level of competency is a requirement for even being hired in that position. They may then have to complete courses or other skills to achieve the 'Competent' rating with an optional 'Highly competent' rating available to be manually given by their manager.

The user skill profile in Totara Perform allows users and their managers to track progress in all assigned skills - making it clear what needs to be done to achieve a higher rating. There are also a number of graphs here that show skills mapped against various positions, so that users can easily see what skill rating they need in a certain skill for their position. For example, you might need a higher skill rating for the 'Fire safety' skill if you are a Fire Marshal than if you are a regular employee.

Building skills

When building new skills, you will follow this basic workflow in most cases:

• Create or edit a skill framework for your skill to sit in.

• Create or edit the skill scale that will define the criteria used to rate your skills.

• Optionally, you can create skill types to allow you to add custom fields to a skill item.

• Create your skill, referred to as a skill item. This is the individual skill that sits within your framework.

If you have Totara Perform, you can then do the following:

• Once you have created one or more skill items you can then add achievement paths for them. This is the set of parameters that need to be met in order for a specific skill rating to be awarded.

• Finally you will need to go to the skill assignments section to assign the skills to different users or groups of users (such as audiences and positions).