Purpose

This article explains how to manage and optimize your skills taxonomy with Skills Design.

Audience

Talent admins, HRBPs, Talent Leaders

Overview

Skills Design provides a unified interface to manage your organization’s skills, allowing you to add, edit, delete, and organize skills into categories. This feature ensures that your skills taxonomy remains relevant and up-to-date.

Manage skills

Click Talent Design from the app launcher (waffle) menu and then click Skills from the navigation bar to reach Skills Design.

Add skills

You can add new skills to enhance parsing and analytics. Over time, Skills Design learns the equivalences and adjacencies of these newly added skills. You cannot add a skill with the same name or a new standard skill if its equivalent is already present.

To add a new skill, follow these steps:

1. Click Add Skill on the Skills Design page.
2. Enter these details for the new skill:
   1. Enter a Skill Name.
   2. Equivalent Skills - you can manually type and search for a skill, or click the ‘wand’ button to find equivalent skills with AI. Click Add Skill to add an equivalent skill.
   3. Use the Select Skill Grouping dropdown to categorize the new skill within relevant skill groups.
   4. Enter a Skill Description to provide more information about the skill.
3. Click Save.
4. Click Save Skills Design.

Edit skills

When a skill or its equivalent is edited, the prevalence updates in real-time. Category and subcategory edits don't affect prevalence but refresh immediately.

Example: If ‘SQL’ is edited to ‘SQL Language,’ the prevalence of the skill will decrease if no employees/fewer employees possess ‘SQL Language’.

To edit a skill, follow these steps:

1. Click the ‘edit’ (pencil icon) button for the relevant skill on the Skills Design page.
2. In the Edit Skill window, modify the skill as per your requirement.
3. Click Save.
4. Click Save Skills Design.

Delete skills

Deleting a skill or its equivalent does not affect previously parsed skills across Eightfold. However, deleted skills won't be parsed in future employee profile updates. For claimed profiles, deletion has no impact unless users manually trigger skill standardization.

To delete a skill, follow these steps:

1. Click the ‘edit’ (pencil icon) button for the relevant skill on the Skills Design page.
2. In the Edit Skill window, click Delete.
3. Confirm deletion.
4. Click Save Skills Design.

Split or merge skills

Equivalent skills can be split from the primary skills.
Merging skills combines their prevalence for better analytics, which refreshes weekly. Merging skills occurs when an existing standard skill is added as an equivalent skill to another standard skill.

To split a skill, follow these steps:

1. Click the ‘edit’ (pencil icon) button for the relevant skill on the Skills Design page.
2. In the Edit Skill window, click Split.
3. In the Split Skills window, select the candidate skills that you want to split into an individual skill. Click Split Skills.
4. Click Save Skills Design.

When you make changes to the Skills Design, you must click Save Skills Design or your changes will be lost when you refresh the page.

Analytics

Skills Design enhances skill analytics by standardizing and accounting for equivalences. Customers can access detailed insights into skill prevalence, with data available for download in CSV format. This helps in understanding organizational-specific skills across categories and subcategories.