Exploring Skills Management

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Exploring Skills Management

    Skills Management in ServiceNow enables organizations to define, categorize, and assign skills to individual users or groups, linking these skills to tasks and projects. This functionality helps identify skill gaps and supports effective hiring, coaching, and training strategies. It centralizes skill management, standardizes skill definitions and levels, and improves task assignment accuracy by matching work with the right expertise. Skills Management is automatically activated when the Skills Foundation plugin is enabled, which also introduces AI capabilities for enhanced talent management.

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    Key Features

    • Centralized Skill Management: Create and maintain skills, skill categories, and skill levels from a single location.
    • Hierarchical Skills: Skills can contain other skills, allowing inheritance of child skills when a parent skill is assigned.
    • Group Skill Assignment: Assign skills to groups so all members inherit those skills, simplifying skill distribution.
    • Standardization: Define consistent skill categories and levels to track expertise uniformly across the organization.
    • Task and Project Alignment: Assign work based on skills to minimize reassignments and improve efficiency.
    • Skill Gap Analysis: Identify missing skills and address them through targeted coaching, training, or hiring.
    • Integration with ServiceNow Applications: Utilize skills in IT Service Management, Customer Service Management, Field Service Management, Human Resources, and Project Portfolio Management to optimize resource allocation and team effectiveness.
    • Role-Based Access: Manage skills with defined roles—Skill Administrator, Skill Manager, and Skill User—each with specific permissions for creating, updating, assigning, or viewing skills and related data.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Reduce incident and task resolution time by routing work to agents with appropriate skills.
    • Improve workforce planning by understanding current skill inventories and gaps.
    • Automate skill-based task assignments, decreasing managerial workload and increasing accuracy.
    • Enhance employee development and career progression through clear skill tracking and training plans.
    • Support hiring decisions by identifying organizational skill requirements.
    • Standardize skill management practices across multiple departments and applications for consistency.

    Activation

    To begin using Skills Management, activate the Skills Management plugin (com.snc.skillsmanagement). This plugin is also enabled automatically when you activate the Skills Foundation plugin (com.snskillsint), which adds AI-driven capabilities for leveraging skills data.

    Use Skills Management to associate skills with individual users or groups and assign them to tasks or projects. You can also assess the skills needed for your organization, identify gaps, and implement effective plans for hiring or training of your teams.

    Important:
    Using the Skills Management application, you can create skills and skill categories manually, and also assign them manually to users. Skills Foundation uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help your organization leverage skills data for talent management and employee development. When you activate the Skills Foundation plugin (com.sn_skills_int), it also activates the Skills Management plugin (com.snc.skills_management). For information on Skills Foundation, see Skills Foundation.
    Skills can contain other skills. For example, if you define network as a skill, you can add router as the skill it contains. A user assigned to a parent skill grants access to a child skill. Once a skill is assigned to a group, all members of the group inherit that skill and any others contained within it. Skills management works similar to ServiceNow platform Create a role.
    Using this application, you can:
    • Manage skills for agents and your employees from a central location.
    • Use a standard way to identify skills for your organization and keep them up to date.
    • Group skills into categories and define skill levels to track the expertise of your resources at a granular level.
    • Reduce task or project reassignments by assigning tasks to agents and projects to teams that have the right skills to work on those items.
    • Identify skill gaps and resolve them by implementing effective plans for coaching and training of resources.
    • Manage the effectiveness of your team by evaluating the skills your team has and determining the skills you need for on your projects.

    Integration with ServiceNow® applications

    A skill is an ability to do something that comes from training, experience, and practice. As a system administrator, you can define skills for your organization and assign it to users and groups from a central location. As an application manager, you can assign users to tasks based on these skills. For example, if you are an IT manager, you can use the Skills Management application to define skills and assign them to users and groups, which facilitates the routing of incidents to agents with relevant skills.

    Group skills into categories and define skill levels to standardize skill implementation across your organization.

    Use skills from the centralized location in the following applications:
    • IT service management - As an IT manager, reduce your time and costs while resolving incidents by assigning work items to the right agent. Assess the skill gaps that agents have in your team and coach or train agents based on those needs. Identify and define a standard way to keep skill categories and levels consistent within your team.
    • Customer service management - As a customer service manager, identify agent skills and automatically route tasks to agents who have the required skill to work on those tasks. Manage your team's effectiveness by understanding what type of skills your employees need to get hired or get trained to take on other roles.
    • Field service management- As a field service or customer service manager, use rules to identify skills and skill levels that agents require to resolve work items such as cases, work order tasks, and agent interactions. Automate skill assignment to reduce a manager's work load. Automatically assign tasks to agents using Field Service dynamic scheduling.
    • Human resources management - As an HR manager, identify the types of skills your organization needs and make hiring decisions based on those needs. Manage your team's effectiveness by understanding what type of skills your employees need to get hired or get trained to take on other roles.
    • Project portfolio management - As a project and portfolio manager, standardize how you categorize skills, define skill level types, and add skill levels for your team. Set up skills for your team in a central location and make them available within your team. Prevent project reassignments by assigning projects to the team members who have the right skills to work on them.

    Roles used in Skills Management

    Role Description
    Skill administrator [skill_admin]
    • Inherits the skill manager [skill_manager] and skill user [skill_user] roles.
    • Can perform create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations on skills, skill levels, skill level types, skill categories, and sub categories.
    Skill manager [skill_manager]
    • Inherits the skill user [skill_user] role.
    • Can perform read operations on skills, skill levels, skill level types, skill categories, and sub categories.
    • Can assign skills to users and groups.
    Skill user [skill_user] Can perform read operations on skills, skill levels, and skill level types.

    Activating Skills Management

    The Skills Management application is activated when you enable the Skills Management (com.snc.skills_management) plugin.