What is Totara Skills?

Totara Skills helps organisations build a skills-driven workforce by creating a trusted view of current capabilities, the gaps that need to be closed, and the skills required for the future. It is a flexible and tailored skills management platform that brings together skills, goals, performance activities and career development to enable organisations to manage capability, growth and readiness from a single, connected system.

Totara Skills allows organisations to define the skills and competencies required for roles, track how individuals are progressing against those requirements, and identify where gaps or risks exist across the workforce. It connects skills to positions, learning, goals and performance activities, giving employees, managers and leaders a consistent, evidence-based view of current capability and future readiness at every level of the organisation.

By giving employees, managers and leaders clear visibility into workforce capability, Totara Skills allows every level of the organisation to turn insights into action, with targeted development that either helps close an individual skill gap, plan a career path, or supports wider workforce planning decisions.

Skills

Skills allow you to map capabilities 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). By setting up achievement paths you can decide how skills are achieved.

Building new skills involves creating or editing a skill framework for your skill to sit in, then creating skill scales and skill types to use with your skill item.

Once you have created one or more skills in Totara Skills you can then use skill assignments to assign these to individual users or to groups of users via audiences and positions.

Skills profile

Totara Skills allows users to review their skills profile, showing a personal view of their assigned skills, including their statuses, achieved and required levels, and information about expiration. This allows employees and their managers to keep up to date with their knowledge and development.

The skill profile gives employees a single place to see where they currently stand against each assigned skill, which skills are approaching or past their expiry, and which skills still need attention. Managers can use the same information at an individual or team level to prioritise development conversations and identify where support is most needed.

Skills heatmaps

Skills heatmaps provide a visual way to review skill metrics for organisations, audiences, positions and users. By presenting proficiency and readiness data visually, heatmaps make it easier to quickly spot areas of strength and weakness across large groups, without needing to review individual records one at a time.

Assessment checklists

Assessment checklists can be set up to support skills assessments in a structured way. A checklist breaks a skill assessment down into specific criteria or observable behaviours, which can be reviewed and confirmed individually rather than relying on a single overall rating. This gives managers and reviewers a clearer, more consistent basis for deciding whether a skill has been achieved.

Competency roles

Competency roles are reusable groups of skills, designed to make it easier to manage common capability requirements across multiple positions, teams or job families. For example, an organisation can create a competency role for a production line, a healthcare device, a compliance area or another repeated skill set. When a competency role is assigned to a position, the skills included in that role are automatically associated with that position.

This approach avoids the need to add the same set of skills individually to every position that shares a common requirement. If the skill requirements for a competency role change, updating the role automatically updates every position it is assigned to, rather than requiring each position to be edited separately.

Totara goals

Totara goals provide a structured way for users and managers to set, track and review individual performance and development goals. Goals can be created and updated directly in Totara Skills, with progress reviewed as part of performance activities to support ongoing conversations between users and their managers.

Goals can also be broken down into individual tasks, linked to relevant courses and supported by comments, helping users understand the actions and learning required to achieve them. Reporting allows managers and administrators to monitor goal progress and completion.

Career paths

Career paths help an employee understand possible next steps within the organisation. The employee can browse recommended positions, view how closely they match the requirements of a position, and see the skills they already meet as well as the skills they still need to develop. Totara Skills can then calculate a career path from the employee's current position to their target position.

This gives employees a practical, evidence-based view of career progression rather than a purely aspirational one. Rather than simply listing job titles an employee might move into, the career path view shows the specific skill gaps that stand between the employee's current position and a target position, along with the closeness of the match. This allows both the employee and their manager to focus development activity on the areas that will have the most impact on the employee's readiness for that next step.

Insights

Totara Skills provides insight views for positions and skills, helping to identify readiness, gaps and risks across the organisation. These insight views are intended to support workforce planning decisions, such as where additional training investment is needed, which positions are at risk due to low readiness, and which employees may be ready for promotion or redeployment.

The following insights are available:

• Position insights: Helps managers and administrators understand, for a given position, how well the current or potential workforce meets its skill requirements, and who might be ready to step into that position if it becomes vacant.

• Skill insights: Allows the organisation to see, for a specific skill, how proficiency is distributed across the workforce, where gaps exist, and whether readiness for that skill is improving or declining over time.

Performance activities

Performance activities are very flexible to suit your needs. These activities are how you carry out various performance tasks including appraisals, check-ins and other feedback.

You can pull in content from other parts of the site, such as goals, skills, evidence and learning - to get a thorough review of your people and what support they might need to achieve their full potential.

Time to readiness taxonomies

Time to readiness taxonomies can be configured to represent how quickly users are expected to achieve full proficiency for positions within the organisation. These allow managers to assess whether users are ready for positions and plan organisation-wide development.