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Get Started With Skills
Get Started With Skills
Joanna Brenneman avatar
Written by Joanna Brenneman
Updated over a year ago

In This Article



Skills Overview

The Skills app helps sales leaders and enablement professionals instill the skills that win deals. Skills helps trainers inculcate team cultures that prize continuous learning. What's more, it helps trainers evaluate that learning by collecting analytics such as:

  • Manager reviews

  • Employee self-reflections

  • Workflow observations

  • Performance metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs)

Team and Individual Skillset Analysis

Skills gives managers and trainers insight into performance areas in which their teammates struggle, enabling them to create and assign training content based on a user's performance. This can be done on an individual or group basis.

What Are Coaching Plans in Skills?

Coaching plans help managers track strategies and tactics to ensure that all of their team members achieve consistent growth over time.


Who Uses Skills?

People in several roles can benefit from using Skills.

Sales and Support Leaders

Sales and support leads can often include trainers and enablement professionals during the onboarding process. The trainers can define a skillset for their team to become pros at. By analyzing and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of their teams or across an entire department or organization, they can improve training material based on performance data.

Managers

Managers are often the first source of information for new employees, answering onboarding questions and providing opportunities for continued training. Managers also review, assess, and evaluate employees' performance to ensure they are growing into their roles and meeting their objectives. When certain skills seem to be lacking, or when learners fail to maintain a current and comprehensive understanding of those skills, managers can use the Skills app to create coaching plans to help improve employees' professional development.

Evaluators

People in roles such as team leads or quality assurance are often charged with the job of evaluating the work of other team members. These users can complete observations to monitor learners' progress and provide data to managers to help create or update coaching plans.

Employees

Employees meet the responsibilities of their roles, aim for performance targets, and help their organizations make progress throughout each quarter. In Skills, they can see how they're progressing through the training process, where they're thriving, and where they need to improve. Skills helps employees identify areas for professional growth.


Access the Skills App

Toggle the app switcher in the upper left corner of the user interface. The Skills app is represented by a trophy icon.

Users in admin and manager roles will arrive at the Team overview. Learners, creators, and users who lack group management permissions will arrive at My Skills.


Initial Setup

On loading Skills for the first time, you'll be guided through initial setup by a wizard, a software assistant that contains the following steps:

  • Create roles for teams

  • Manage skill library

  • Assign skills to teams

  • Additional options

Because wizard progress is automatically saved you can complete initial setup in one sitting or at your leisure.


Create a Skills Group

When an admin first accesses the Skills page, it prompts the user to create a new team.

The user needs to select Select or Create a Group > then they can either:

  1. Create a New Team

  2. Select an Existing Skills Group (if applicable). This option applies if another admin has already created groups in Skills.

When choosing Create New Group the user can view an embed of the Seismic Learning People tab. The user can then select ➕ next to either a Smart Group or Custom Group to set up a new group in Skills.

Admins or users with people creation permissions can create custom groups or smart groups through specific rule sets in the Skills application. This is done through an iframe version of the People page in Skills.

After setting up the initial groups in Skills, to access group creation again the admin will select the menu icon in the upper right-hand corner, > select People.


Add Skills to a Team

Each team in Skills has its own designated skillsets. To add skills to teams, select the collapsed menu icon (☰) in the upper right-hand corner, then select Team Settings.

Skills can be added on a group-by-group basis. To toggle from one group to another select the drop-down toggle bar next to the Team Settings header.

From a team's overview page, you can assign skills by selecting them from Skills Library or create a new skill altogether. If the user decides to create a new skill, the New Skill edit page populates prompting the user to fill in:

  • Skill Name

  • The expectations of the skill

  • The category of the skill

  • Any additional groups the skill is relevant for

  • Beneficial-related content based on the skillset.

  • External web links as a resource

  • A performance metric

Once complete > select Save Changes.

This redirects the admin back to the Group Settings overview.



Map Seismic Learning Content to Skills

Admins and managers with ownership of content can map content to a skill.

The reason behind mapping content to a specific skill is with the idea in mind for coaching purposes.

Mapped content provides access to the content as optional learning to the user(s) in the group to this skill is made available.

Once mapped, the group's name is added under Add to Learn on the content's overview page in the Learning application.

For example, the skill Ask Great Questions is available to the groups:

  • Q1 2019 Sales Onboarding Cohort

  • #1 West Coast Team

  • Customer Support

The related content for this skill is Essential Skills for Customer Support. When navigating to the path's overview page, the three above groups' names can be located under the Add to Learn module.

For more information on mapping content to a Coaching Plan, check out this article.


Add Skills to Teams from the Skills Library

After the initial set-up, the admin can edit the skill, and add additional groups if needed on the Skills Edit page by selecting the menu icon in the upper right corner > select Skills Library.

In the Skills Library, choose the skill to edit.

To include additional group(s) type in the name of the group under the Groups module > and select Save Changes.


Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Do customers need two sets of authentication credentials to use Skills and Seismic Learning?

A. No, logging into Learning gives you access to both the training and Skills applications. Use the app switcher in the upper left corner of the interface to switch between them.

Q. Does Seismic Learning practice/training data feed into Skills?

A. The two cannot be aggregated at this time.

Q. Is the Skills app mobile-friendly?

A. Yes, Skills is device agnostic. It looks great on smartphones, tablets, and desktops.

Q. Is Skills data included in Learning's open API?

A. Not at this time.

Q. If a user is moved from Group A to Group B, and then Group A is archived, are the user's skill reviews carried over to Group B?

No, currently Skill data for users and assessments are group-specific instead of Skill specific. Meaning when a group is archived, the skillsets are also archived with it. To restore a user's skill reviews, the group will need to be restored.

Q. Is a user able to see all skill data related to a user in one place?

A. Skill data for users (including assessments) are tied at the group level instead of tied to the individual skill set. Therefore, any skill data associated with a user when assigned to Group A cannot be seen when reviewing the same user’s skill data in Group B, and vice versa.

Q. Do roles from the core Learning application carry over to Skills?

A. Yes, user roles are the same in both applications.

Q. When people are archived and then restored, does their skills data return?

A. Yes, a restored user’s data is brought back in both the core Learning application and in the Skills application.

Q. If a user is archived in Seismic Learning, what happens to this user in Skills?

A. When a user is archived in Learning they are archived from Skills as well.

Q. How do I archive a group in the Skills app?

A. Archiving a group in Learning will remove the group from Skills. Once a group has been removed from the Skills application, it can only be restored in the Learning core app. Outstanding assignments remain in place when groups are archived, and scheduled assignments repopulate once the group is restored. Archived users will no longer show up on the team member list but their assessments data will still be there and used in the aggregated data.

Q. Can a customer remove users from the Skills app to bring down their user count?

A. The Skills application is tied to Groups. If Group A with thirty users is attached to the Skills application and is assigned a skillset the user count goes up by thirty active users. To decrease user count, the customer should ensure no skills are tied to a group. Keep in mind, when a skill is assigned to a single user since skill data is tracked at a group level it counts the entire group as the active user count.

Q. Do admins and managers have to be Skills users to have access to grade and/or observe skillset assessments?

A. If a user isn't set up in a group with associated skills or is set as an admin of Skills they won't be able to view Skills data. With that being said, a user in the manager role needs to be set as the designated manager of a group with associated skills then the user can view their assigned group(s) of users' skills data. Admins can view all user's skills data.

Q. Can content be assigned from the Skills app?

A. Yes, Seismic Learning content can be assigned through a coaching plan. For more information on coaching plans, check out this article "Skills - Coaching."

Q. Does content ownership carry over for "Recommended Content?"

A. There is no connection to the ownership of content from Learning to Skills.

Q. If a customer is leveraging content in platforms outside of Seismic Learning, could they use this content in the Skills application?

A. Yes, customers can recommend content outside of Learning using the external link option. For more information on including external links, check out the article, "Skills - Coaching."

Q. Does Seismic Learning recommend a cadence or accompanying strategy for how many skills should be tracked, frequency of assessments, etc.?

In the Skills application, there are descriptions of each of the different assessment types. The cadence and frequency of when skillsets are assigned is left up to the customer. Here are some suggest best practices, however.

  • For Skillset Reviews, Self-Reflections, and Performance Metrics: we recommend these be reviewed quarterly, but also understanding each business might have a unique cadence.

  • For Observations: The best practice is to complete at least two of these skills for each rep per month.

  • How many Skills should be created? We recommend anywhere between ten and twenty as a general rule of thumb.

  • More than twenty skills and users might get too granular. Less than ten, and the customer may not be breaking skillsets down enough.

Skills are meant to capture functional skills (a mix of soft and hard skills) for the role. Skills aren't intended to capture items such as alignment with company values.

Q. Is Average Skillset Review just the sum of the other 3 criteria points? Observation, Reflection, and Metrics?

A. Check out this article, Skills Scoring Calculation, for more information.


Questions? Contact the Support team at support@lessonly.com

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