Managing the skill library

The skill library is the list of skills your account recognises. Everything else — what a job title requires, what a course teaches, what a person holds — points at an entry in this list, so it is worth getting the list right before building on it.

For what a level means and where a person’s level comes from, read How skill levels are recorded.

Where it is

Choose Admin, then Learning in the left-hand menu and Skills.

What the list tells you

Skills are listed alphabetically with a level type and three usage counts: Users, Job titles and Courses.

Those three columns are the most useful thing on the screen. They tell you whether a skill is doing any work. A skill with zeros across all three is one nobody holds, nothing requires and nothing teaches — a candidate for removing before it gets chosen by mistake.

They are also the safety check before you change anything. Editing a skill that six job titles require is a different act from editing one nothing uses.

Adding a skill

1. Choose New skill.
2. Name it as your organisation would say it, not as a system would file it.
3. Choose its level type — how finely you want to record it.

Level type is the decision to take slowly, because it determines what can ever be recorded against the skill. “Achieved (yes/no)” answers whether somebody has it; a named scale answers how good they are. Changing your mind later means re-recording everybody.

Most skills do not need a scale. Use one where the difference between beginner and expert genuinely changes what somebody is allowed to do.

Importing a list

Import skills takes a spreadsheet, which is the sensible route when you are setting up rather than adding one skill. It accepts .xlsx, .xls, .xlsm, .csv and .txt.

Import into an empty library rather than an established one. Merging a spreadsheet into a list people are already using is how you end up with “Communication” and “Communications” as two skills that mean the same thing and satisfy different job titles.

Export takes the library out, which is also the quickest way to review it with somebody who does not use Learnient.

Skills created by AI course generation

Skills can arrive in the library without anyone adding them, because generating or converting a course tags it with the skills it develops and creates one where nothing you already have means the same thing.

Learnient compares by meaning rather than by wording, so a course about selling to suppliers is tagged with your existing Negotiation rather than adding “Supplier price negotiation” next to it. This is why the naming advice above matters: the plainer your names are, the more often the right existing skill is recognised.

Skills created this way are always Achieved (yes/no), and their names are written to match the rest of your library — sentence case, with acronyms left alone, so you get “Purchase order management” rather than “Purchase Order Management”.

Review new arrivals occasionally. The Courses count tells you which skills came from one course and have been used nowhere since, and those are the ones worth either giving a proper scale or removing.

Note: a skill marked as one people are hired for rather than trained in is never suggested for a course, so it will not appear on a generated one however relevant it looks.

What to do about two skills that mean the same thing

Two skills that mean the same thing — “Communication” and “Communications”, or “Vendor management” and “Supplier management” — split your reporting in half, satisfy different job titles, and quietly make skill gaps look better or worse than they are.

Spotting them is the hard part, so ask support to run a check over your library. It compares every skill with every other by meaning rather than spelling, lists the pairs it believes are one skill, and can merge a pair for you: everything recorded against the retired skill moves to the one you keep, and anyone rated on both keeps the higher of their two levels.

A pair measured differently is not merged automatically, and that is deliberate. Turning a “Skilled” rating on a four-level scale into a yes/no “has it” is a decision about what those ratings meant, so align the scales first if you want them merged.

Until then, archive the one you are not using rather than deleting it, so the levels already recorded against people survive.

Archiving

Active and Archived are separate views. Archiving flips the skill between the two and does nothing else, so levels already recorded against people are untouched.

Archive rather than delete wherever a skill has ever been used. The counts in the list tell you which those are.

What to do next

A skill on its own does nothing. It starts mattering when a job title requires it — see Setting skill requirements on a job title — or when a course teaches it, which is set on the course’s own Skills tab.