Exploring Skills Foundation

Release version: Xanadu

Updated August 1, 2024

3 minutes to read

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Summary of Exploring Skills Foundation

The Skills Foundation platform leverages AI to analyze external industry data and extract detailed information about skills and job titles. It provides a comprehensive inventory of over 6,000 skills to help organizations build and optimize their workforce based on these insights. The platform serves as the foundational technology behind Talent Development applications, enabling skill-based career planning and supporting improved business outcomes.

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Key Features

Skills Foundation Engine: Core technology powering Talent Development with extensive skills data.
Talent Development Integration: Uses skills to guide managers and employees through career planning, skill validation, and learning recommendations.
Skill Validation in Manager Hub: Managers can review and validate employee skill proficiency during scheduled conversations.
Skills-Driven Learning Recommendations: Delivers personalized course suggestions based on employee skills to enhance engagement and productivity.
Proactive Prompts: Provides contextual, actionable skill insights through multiple engagement channels like Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Zoom, and SMS.
Multilingual Support: Skill names and descriptions are available in 10 supported languages, enhancing accessibility for global workforces. Custom skills require separate translation uploads.
Hiring Core Integration: Offers a repository for hiring requirements and skill recommendations for role groups by analyzing hiring data.
Skill Importing: Employees can import skills directly from resumes or LinkedIn profiles for accurate skill profiling.
Skill Recommender: Enables employees to search for and add skills they wish to develop or improve.

Key Outcomes

Comprehensive Employee Skill Profiles: Organizations gain a clear view of employee capabilities to support workforce planning.
Accurate Skill Identification: AI-powered analysis identifies essential skills, prompting employees to update their profiles accordingly.
Validated Skills Transparency: Managers validate employee skills, which are then visible on employee profiles, enhancing trust and clarity.
Enhanced Manager Engagement: Managers can review skill development activities before validation, facilitating informed skill assessments.
Improved Workforce Transformation: By connecting skills to actionable insights, organizations accelerate business outcomes and support employee growth.

The Skills Foundation platform uses AI to process external industry data, extracting information about skills and job titles. Learn how Skills Foundation can help transform your organization to build a workforce that is based on skills.

Overview of Skills Foundation

The core capability of the platform is the underlying technology that resides in the Skills Foundation engine. The Skills Foundation application is equipped with base system data, which contains an extensive inventory of over 6000 skills. Access to this vast skills data enables you to build and optimize your workforce based on these comprehensive skills insights.

Skills Foundation for Talent Development

The Skills Foundation engine acts as the foundational layer that powers all the capabilities within Talent Development. Talent Development applications use skills at its core to guide managers and employees through their career plans. This approach not only supports individual development but also contributes to achieving better business outcomes. For more information, see Talent Development.

Note:

Skills Foundation is only integrated with Talent Development applications.

Skill Validation in Manager Hub

As a manager, you can review and validate the skill proficiency levels updated by your employees by opening the conversations scheduled with them. Within Conversations there’s a dedicated section that offers details about skills that require validation. For more information, see Validate skills in Manager Hub.

Skills-driven Learning recommendations

Talent Development uses Skills Foundation to deliver learning recommendations for employees and their managers, keeping them engaged and productive. For more information, see Learning overview. The Skills Foundation application integrates with Learning to introduce skills-driven learning search results that your managers can use to recommend courses based on the skills of your employees. For more information, see Learning integration with Skills Foundation.

Proactive Prompts integrated with Skills Foundation

Proactive Prompts enable contextual and proactive engagement for your managers and employees by bringing actionable insights as prompts into their flow of work. You can use these prompts in multiple engagement channels, such as Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, Zoom, and the short messaging service (SMS). For more information, see Proactive Prompts for Skills Foundation.

Support for multiple languages in Skills Foundation

Employees can view the skill names and their descriptions translated when they change their preferred language to a non-English language. Skills Foundation supports the following 10 languages.

Note:

Make sure that the respective language plugins are installed to ensure that the skill translations are also downloaded for those languages.
The translations are only provided for the base system skills which are included by default in the Skills Foundation application. If you have custom skills, you must get the custom skills translated and upload them separately.
When searching for skills using the Search option, use only your preferred language. For example, if your preferred language is Dutch, you search in Dutch.

Table 1. Supported languages in Skills Foundation
Language	Language code
Dutch	nl
French	fr
German	de
Japanese	ja
Italian	it
Spanish	es
Korean	ko
Portuguese	pt
Simplified Chinese	zh
Arabic	ar

Hiring core for Skills Foundation

Hiring Core provides a repository to store information for your hiring requirements. Activate the Hiring Core plugin (app-hiring-core) to start using it. Skills Foundation runs predictions on the data in the hiring core tables and offers skill recommendations for role groups. For more information, see Hiring Core.

Key benefits

Connect skills to action in the transformation of your workforce and accelerate business outcomes by using the Skills Foundation application.

Table 2. Skills Foundation benefits
Features	Benefits
Employee skills profile	Provides a comprehensive view of the skills that your employees have.
Pre-seed employee skills	Identifies the essential skills of an employee by analyzing the external data and data provided by employees about skills and titles. Prompt employees to update their skills based on this information.
About Job Architecture	Associates the career data of your organization with skills.
Proactive Prompts for Skills Foundation	Enables contextual and proactive engagement for your managers and employees by bringing actionable insights as prompts into their flow of work.
Import skills from your resume or LinkedIn profile	Imports skills from resumes and LinkedIn profiles of employees.
Validated skills	Managers validate the skill proficiency level of employees in the Manager Hub and employees can see these validated skills on their skills profile.
View activity insights	Managers can view and review activities related to the skill that an employee has made progress on before validated them.
Add skills by using the skill recommender	Enables your employees to search for skills that they’re interested in developing or improving and then adding them to their skills profile.