Setting skill requirements on a job title
A skill requirement says what a role needs. Once set, everybody holding that job title is compared against it automatically, and the difference is a skill gap — so this is the setting that turns your skill library from a list into something that reports.
Requirements live on the job title, not on the skill. That catches people out: you do not open a skill to say who needs it, you open the role that needs it.
Where it is
Section titled “Where it is”Choose Admin, then People in the left-hand menu and Job titles, then edit a job title.
Adding a requirement
Section titled “Adding a requirement”- Find Required skills.
- Choose Add a required skill.
- Pick the skill.
- Pick the required level — the levels offered are the ones that skill actually has, so a yes/no skill offers achieved and a scaled skill offers its own named levels.
- Choose an urgency.
- Confirm, then save the job title.
Only skills that already exist and have levels can be required, so build the skill library first.
Urgency is about the gap, not the skill
Section titled “Urgency is about the gap, not the skill”Urgency answers one question: if somebody in this role is missing this skill, how quickly does it matter?
| Urgency | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Not specified | No answer given |
| Tolerable | No immediate risk — address in the next training cycle |
| Short-term impact | Will cause problems within weeks or months |
| Immediate risk | Causing, or about to cause, a real problem now |
The same skill can be urgent in one role and tolerable in another, which is the point of setting it here rather than on the skill. A missing forklift licence is immediate for a warehouse operative and tolerable for somebody who covers the warehouse twice a year.
Leaving it unspecified is a real choice rather than a blank: it means gaps in this skill are not ranked against anything.
Role criticality
Section titled “Role criticality”Alongside the requirements sits Role criticality — how important the role itself is to the business, from Supporting through Standard to Business-critical.
It is used to prioritise whose gaps are surfaced first, so a gap in a business-critical role rises above the same gap elsewhere. Set it once per job title; it applies to every requirement on that role.
What a requirement does
Section titled “What a requirement does”Somebody below the required level shows a gap against that role. Somebody at or above it does not.
A lapsed skill stops meeting the requirement even though the level is still recorded, so a person can move into a gap without anybody reassessing them — see How skill expiry works, which also covers renewing one.
For how levels are compared and where a person’s level comes from, see How skill levels are recorded.
What happens when you save
Section titled “What happens when you save”Gaps are worked out by comparing what people hold against what the role requires, rather than stored when you save — so a new requirement applies to everybody holding the job title already, not only to future joiners.
The gap appears in reporting and on their development screens. Chasing it is a separate decision.
Adding a requirement to a widely-held job title can therefore create a large number of gaps at once. That is usually the truth arriving rather than something going wrong, but it is worth expecting before you save.