In This Article
π‘ Note: This article is written from an admin's point of view.
What Is the Skills App? Why Use It?
Skills provide two main purposes:
Help align management teams and enablement professionals on the skillsets needed to succeed.
Provides continuous up-to-date training.
Skills evaluate a user's ability on a specific skillset through a variety of data points. The different data points include:
Manager reviews (potentially on a quarterly cadence).
Employee self-reflections
Workflow observations
Performance metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) are associated with the skill.
Team and Individual Skillset Analysis
Skills help managers and trainers gain insight data into their team(s) areas of struggle. This leads to creating a bigger impact by updating current training based on the user's performance.
This can be done on an individual or group basis.
What are Coaching Plans in Skills?
When creating a Coaching Plan in Skills, managers can track strategies and tactics to ensure all users on their team(s) are performing to achieve consistent growth over periods of time.
Who Uses Skills?
There are a variety of roles in an organization that 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 the go-to's for new employees' onboarding questions, and continued training. As a manager, they are likely completing reviews, grading assessments, and reviewing performance to ensure users are progressing successfully.
When a specific skillset seems to be lacking, or learners are failing to maintain a solid understanding of the skill, managers have the ability to create Coaching Plans to continue their user's career growth progress.
Evaluators
These individuals are likely team leads, senior members, or a QA department. These users can complete observations to monitor learners' progress and provide data to managers to help in creating new or updating old Coaching Plans.
Employees
Employees are users trying to hit goals and help the organization make progress throughout each quarter. In Skills, they can view where they are at today in their training process, and areas of growth for the upcoming quarter.
Where Is the Skills App Located?
To access the Skills app, select the book icon in the upper-left corner of Lessonly's user interface. Toggle it from Training to Skills, represented by a trophy icon. π
Admins and managers will arrive at the Team overview. Learners, creators, and users lacking 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
For more information about the Skills setup wizard, see this article.
π‘ Note: Wizard progress is automatically saved. Complete initial setup in one sitting or at your leisure.
How to 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:
Create a New Team
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 Lessonly core People tab. The user can then select " + " next to either a Smart Group or Custom Group to set up a new group in Skills.
Similar to the Lessonly core application, creating groups work similarly 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 Lessonly 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."
How to Add Skills to a Team
Each team in Skills has its own designated skillsets. To add skills to teams, select the collapsed menu icon (β°) 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.
How to Map Lessonly 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 Lessonly core 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.
How to Add Teams to a Skill 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."
Questions? Contact the Support team at support@lessonly.com