Specialized Skills
Introduction
The Specialized Skills feature is a key component of the Eightfold Talent Management platform.
Summary
This feature allows organizations to define specialized skills for employees to drive focused upskilling efforts.
What are specialized skills?
Employees often apply highly specific skills in their daily work that are tied to a particular project, technology, or work context rather than broad, role-based capabilities. Organizations identify and nurture these skills to build deep expertise within their workforce.
Examples:
Manufacturing roles: Apply “PLC Programming for Siemens S7 Controllers”.
Regional requirements: Assign “GDPR Compliance” for employees based in Germany.
High performance: Develop advanced, project-specific skills for select employee groups.
Strategy: Define future or strategic skills based on an employee’s specific work.
Key Characteristics
Flexibility: Skills aren’t necessarily tied to a role; they can depend on project, location, performance, seniority, or any other priorities.
Individualized: Skills vary from employee to employee to reflect unique work contexts.
Types of Specialized Skills
Specialized skills in Eightfold can be defined and assigned in two ways, depending on how your organization prefers to manage skill governance. Both types are surfaced under the Specialized Skills tab on the employee’s Skills Assessment page and feed into the same downstream recommendations and reporting.
Admin Defined Specialized Skills
Admin defined specialized skills offer a centralized way to manage specialized skills across the organization. A central admin (or team of admins) collaborates with different departments to gather the specialized skills expected of employees, consolidates them into a single CSV file, and ingests them into Eightfold via file ingestion.
This approach enforces a standardized, streamlined process for defining specialized skills and works well for small to mid-sized organizations where a central team can effectively coordinate skill definitions across departments and locations.
For detailed configuration and ingestion steps, see Admin Defined Specialized Skills.
Manager Added Specialized Skills
Manager added specialized skills offer a decentralized way to manage specialized skills. Instead of relying on a central admin team, direct managers add the specialized skills their employees should possess, based on the day-to-day context of their work.
This approach is especially useful for large organizations (typically 100,000+ employees) spread across regions, departments, and locations, where it is operationally challenging for a single team to maintain a comprehensive specialized skills file. By handing the agency to managers, the organization can capture skill expectations more accurately and at scale.
For detailed configuration and usage steps, see Manager added specialized skills.
Grouping Specialized Skills
Grouping applies to specialized skills regardless of how they were defined — both admin-defined and manager-added specialized skills can be organized into groups. You can group specialized skills by use case, team, or type to drive dedicated assessments and upskilling. Example groups include SAP Skills, Azure Skills, Future Skills, AI Technical Skills, Cloud Computing Skills, and EU Governance Skills.
Defining and mapping groups
To define and map groups:
In the Skills Taxonomy configuration, define skill groups under skill_groups_dict.
Map the skill groups to specialized skills in the skills_dict.
These groups then display in the Specialized Skills section on the employee profile.
Restricting skill groups to specific employee groups
By default, when a specialized skill belongs to more than one skill group, every group it belongs to is shown to any employee assessing that skill — regardless of whether the group is relevant to that employee’s region, role, or business unit.
For example, if “AI Ethics” is part of both an “AI Skills” group and a “GDPR Compliance” group, an employee in India who is assessing AI Ethics for AI Skills would also see the GDPR Compliance group, even though GDPR is intended only for employees in Europe.
Permission-based whitelisting on skill groups and categories solves this. Admins can define that a given skill group (or category) is only visible to a specific set of employees — for example, restricting the GDPR Compliance group to employees based in Germany.
Important scope note: Permission-based whitelisting applies to specialized skills (both admin-defined and manager-added). It does not apply to role skills.
For steps to configure read Configuration guide: Restrict skill groups to specific employee groups
Notes and troubleshooting tips
If a permission expression has a syntax error, the system is designed to block access (default false) for safety.
If a group or category has no permission field, access is allowed by default (backward-compatible behavior).
Downstream Recommendations
Once specialized skills (whether admin defined or manager added) are assessed, they are added to the employee’s profile as profile skills. These skills then power the following recommendations:
Jobs and Projects: The system prioritizes opportunities requiring that specific skill (e.g., Azure Machine Learning Studio).
Mentors: The system uses these skills to suggest relevant mentor matches.
Courses: Recommendations account for an employee’s proficiency level. For example, if an employee has a proficiency of 3 out of 5, the system prioritizes courses with difficulty levels above 3.
Reporting on Specialized Skills
Use Data Hub to report on specialized skills, regardless of whether they are admin defined or manager added.
Filter by Assessed Skills
To list employees who have assessed at least one specialized skill:
Go to Data Hub > profile_skill_assessment table.
Use a query to filter the results by skill_type as specialised_skill.
Note: This query only includes employees who have completed at least one assessment. If an employee is assigned a skill but has not assessed it, they will not appear in these results.
List All Assigned Employees
To view specialized skills defined for all employees, regardless of assessment status:
Join the employee and profile_skill_assessment tables.
Filter for skill_type as specialised_skill.
Note: If your account uses customized table names, replace the standard names in the query with your custom table names.
FAQs
The FAQs below apply to specialized skills broadly. For questions specific to admin-defined ingestion or manager-added workflows, see the linked sub-documents above.
What is the maximum granularity for mapping Specialized Skills (e.g. all employees, Business Unit, Job Family, Job Codes)?
The maximum granularity for mapping specialized skills is at an employee level. Different specialized skills can be assigned to individual employees.
After an employee self-assesses a specialized skill, will it appear as a declared skill on his profile?
Yes. Once an employee self-assesses a specialized skill, it is stored in the same skill proficiency and skill level namespace as other skills and is part of their declared skills on their profile. It is used for matching and recommendations.
How do Specialized Skills interact with matching, recommendations, and other platform features?
Specialized skills are user-specific (not role-specific), treated as required for recommendations, and integrated with MyTasks (reminders if not evaluated), Course Recommendations (for specialized skills the pivot is Self only, no Benchmarks), Peer Assessment, and the same skill-level and proficiency flows. They participate in matching and recommendations; permission filtering only affects which skill groups or categories an employee sees.
Are there any limits or recommendations on the number of Specialized Skills defined?
No explicit limit. Any number of specialized skills can be defined for employees, as applicable.
Does Eightfold provide or plan to provide help identifying Specialized Skills (by industry or role for example)?
There is no standard library or built-in assistance for identifying specialized skills by industry or role in the platform today. Specialized skills are configured per tenant (taxonomy and permissions). Recommend checking release notes and product roadmap for any future offering.