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Setting up Skills

Understand the Skill structure

The skills that you set up here can be displayed in your talent profile.

The total number of Skills that you can add is dependent on your licence. By default, you can configure up to 5000 Skills. A counter displays the total number of skills available and used. The buttons to add Skills will be disabled after the limit is reached. A warning will be displayed when you are close to your licence's permitted limit. You may contact us to increase your limit.

Importing Skills from the Retain Skills Library

Retain allows you to create your own custom Skills taxonomy. If you would prefer to utilise skills from the Retain Skills Library you can do so from the Skills settings.

  1. Go to Settings -> Skills & Certifications
  2. On a Category select Add from Retain's Library
  3. Follow the import steps and confirm the Skills you wish to add
  4. Allow the application time to insert your select skills. Progress can be viewed from the Operation log
  5. Refresh the application to see your skills imported

Skill Types

Skills can be categorised into 3 types:

  • Skills
  • Certifications
  • Language

You can filter by each of these types when curating your Skills taxonomy.

Skill Categories and Subcategories

  • Skills are organised and displayed as Skill Categories and Subcategories
  • Each Skill Category has a Subcategory and a list of associated skills
  • Skills which are not assigned a Category or Subcategory fall into the uncategorised Category/Subcategory

Examples of Skill Categories, Subcategories and Skills:

  • Skill Category: Languages Subcategory: European Languages Skills: German, French or Italian
  • Skill Category: Information Technology Subcategory: Office Admnistration Skills: MS Excel, MS Word.

Tags

  • Tags are labels that can be attached to skills
  • Tags make finding a Skill easier, especially when the Skill may be known by a different name
  • Tags can be abbreviations, related skills or any additional information
  • A Skill can have unlimited tags, but tags are not mandatory
  • To add a tag, click +New Tag, type in the tag. Hit enter to input the tag before clicking Save Changes.

Examples

  • For the Skill Soft Skills, tags may be Adaptability, Communications skills, Collaborating
  • For the Skill Management, tags may be Stakeholder communication, Business development
  • For the Skill Software Development, tags may be C++, Java, C#

Levels

  • Levels can be applied to all skills of a particular Skill Category
  • You may define a Skill Category with no levels, or define a Skill Category with your own custom levels.

Example

  • Skill Category: Software tools
  • Custom levels: "Proficiency"
  • Levels: Basic, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert

Users that add a Skill of this Category will be able to save their Proficiency level in the Skill e.g. Microsoft Word: Expert

Fields

  • Each Skill Category may have additional fields
  • Some examples of Skill fields: Additional years of experience, Courses taken
  • You can either add new fields or use existing Skill fields that have been added for other Skill Categories

Work with Skill Categories

The following details how to manage Skills Categories

Add a new Skill Category

  1. Navigate to Settings → Skills & Certifications from the left navigation menu
  2. Click Add Category
  3. Enter the Category name
  4. Click Save Changes.

Add Skills to a Category

  1. Select Settings → Skills & Certifications from the left navigation menu
  2. Select a Category
  3. Click Add a Skill
  4. Enter a Skill name (mandatory) and other details
  5. Click on + New Tag to type a tag. Press Enter to apply the tags. Multiple tags may be entered
  6. Click Save changes

Work with Skill Subcategories

Subcategories are set under a parent Category

  1. Navigate to Settings → Skills & Certifications from the left navigation menu
  2. Select a Category
  3. Navigate to a Skill and select the Subcategory field
  4. Click +Add Subcategory if you would like to create a new Subcategory or select from the existing list of values
  5. Click Save Changes.

Delete a Skill Category

  1. Select Settings → Skills & Certifications from the left navigation menu
  2. Select the Skill Category that you wish to delete
  3. Click the 3-dot menu and then click Delete
  4. Confirm the deletion

Note

Take care when deleting a Category as all Subcategories and Skills under the Category are deleted as part of the deletion. Subcategories cannot be deleted directly and are removed when there are no Skills under the Subcategory.

Filter Categories and Subcategories

  1. Click on the filter icon located in the column header
  2. Enter the first few letters of a Category or Subcategory you would like to assign the Skill to. If this Category or Subcategory exists, it will be displayed
  3. Click to select the Category/Subcategory and then click Ok
  4. The rows will be filtered based on the selected Category/Subcategory

Work with Skill Levels

Add a Level to a Skill Category

  1. Select Settings → Skills & Certifications from the left navigation menu. A list of Skill Categories will be displayed
  2. Select a Skill Category
  3. Select the Levels tab
  4. You may add a custom Skill level or use an existing Skill level

Add a custom Skill level

  1. Add a level to the Skill Category if you have not done so already
  2. Select Custom Level from the dropdown
  3. Give a name to your levels. In the screenshot above, the name that has been given is 'Levels'
  4. Click Add Levels
  5. As an example, you may enter Junior in the first row, click Add Levels again and enter Intermediate in the second row and so on
  6. Save changes

Use an existing Skill level

You may use existing levels which have already been added to other Skill Categories. This will copy across the levels from another Skill Category.

  1. Add a level to the Skill Category if you have not done so already
  2. Select Use levels from from the first dropdown
  3. Select the Skill Category from the second dropdown. Levels of this selected Skill Category will be used
  4. Give a name to your level
  5. The levels for your selected Skill Category will be displayed. You may edit and change these levels as necessary
  6. Clicking Save changes will apply the levels to your selected Skill Category

Reorder levels

  1. Click the icon as shown above to reorder levels
  2. The current level will be indicated
  3. Select the new level from the list

Work with Fields

  1. Select Settings → Skills & Certifications from the left navigation menu. A column of Skill Categories will be displayed
  2. Select a Skill Category
  3. Select the Fields tab
  4. Click add a field

Add a new field

  1. Select the field type
  2. Enter a unique field name and add a description
  3. Select whether the field should be mandatory or not
  4. You may have to fill in extra fields depending on your chosen field type
  5. Save changes

Skill Department and Division

Setting Departments and Divisions against a Skill ensures users who belong to those Departments and Divisions see a pre-filtered list of Skills relevant to their line of work. These pre-filtered skills only affect the Profile page. Users can then pick from these skills to add to their profile.

This does not affect filtering Skills in the rest of the application.

For additional controls on Skills Security see Security