Overview

Skill development allows learners to have goals such as mastering all competencies associated with a job title or mastering all competencies associated with a topic/area, and then the learning platform will track these goals, automatically recommend ways to complete the goals, and allow users with the same goal to help each other.

The Skills development feature is particularly useful for supporting career development for your learners as well as formally assigning trackable goals associated with a learner's current or future job responsibilities.

Enabling Skill development

Please note that the Skills development app is a part of AI 360. To get access to the app and obtain pricing information, visit the App Center.

Once you gain access to Skill development, a few new features appear. The learner dashboards will show a new "Goals" widget that displays tiles for each active, paused, and complete goal. Note that the Goals widget is located under Courses by default. Administrators can change its location by editing the dashboard.

The widget also lists current recommendations that can be individually dismissed. To see why a particular recommendation appears, hover over the "Why" text.

If you visit the profile page of users, you will see a new "Goals" tab that lists their active, paused, and complete goals.

Administrators can add/pause/delete goals by selecting them and clicking the appropriate buttons.

Configuring Skill development

If skill development is enabled, administrators can access the Admin/Skills area that allows them to select which kinds of goals a learner can add, configure the recommendations engine, set automation actions for when goals are completed, and configure the scope of Q&A forums.

Goals

The Admin/Skills/Goals area allows you to determine the kind of goals users can add and define the scope of a goal's Q&A forum. 

To select the types of goals users can add, click the appropriate checkboxes under Goals.

By default, the scope of a Q&A forum is "Business", which means that all learners in your business will be able to see and respond to postings in a particular goal's Q&A forum. To change the setting, click on the dropdown and select one from the available options. 

Here's how the other settings work:

Recommendations

In the Admin/Skills/Recommendations area, you can select the kinds of recommendations you'd like to be generated automatically.

How to recommendation engine works:

By default, the recommendations engine runs every hour and recomputes a user's recommendations. Note that there are times, however, when the recommendations for a particular user are immediately regenerated. This happens when a new goal is added for the user, or an existing goal is paused/resumed/removed for the user.

Completion

The Admin/Skills/Completion area allows you to set up site-wide automation actions that are triggered when a particular type of goal is reached.

You can define separate goals for competency and job goal completions by clicking on Add in the appropriate section.

After clicking on Add, a popup will open where you can choose from the available options.

You can also use additional variables depending on the goal type, such as:

Adding goals for learners

We provide two ways for goals to be added for learners. The first approach is to allow learners to add their own goals, and you can configure which kinds of goals can be added via Admin/Skills/Goals. If learners don't have any goals yet, they will see the Goals widget on their dashboard, placed under the Courses by default.

To add a goal, they can click on the three dots in the upper-right corner of the widget and then select Add to see the goal choices.

Depending on which kind of goal they want to add, they'll see a list of possible goals.

They can check the boxes for the goals they want to add and then click Submit.

The Goals widget then will display the list of Active goals and any associated recommendations, if any are present.

If learners click on a goal, it will take them to the goal dashboard, that shows which competencies have been mastered, which have yet to be achieved.

Also here, learners have the option to remove/pause the goal, list current recommendations associated with that goal, and access the Q&A forum where users can post questions about the goal.

Admin view

Administrators can also add goals directly to a learner by visiting the Goals tab on their profile page and then clicking Add.

Select the goal type.

Then check the boxes for each goal to be added for the learner.

Administrators can also see a list of all active/paused/completed users associated with the goal in the goal's Users tab.

To associate competencies with the specific job, go to Users from the main left navigation and click on Job titles.

Then visit the Competencies tab of the Job title area. 

This allows you to list all the competencies that someone with that particular job title should ideally master. To add a new set of competencies, click on the "Add competencies" button.

Groups also have an additional Competencies tab in the Admin area where administrators and instructors can associate competencies with the group. 

This allows you to list all the competencies that someone might be able to improve by joining the group.

How is mastery determined?

The Admin/Mastery page allows you to configure how mastery is calculated, both for a specific competency and for a collection of competencies.

In the example shown above, an individual competency is deemed to have been mastered when there have been at least two assessment values of greater than 70% for the competency.

The field that is most relevant to Skills development is the "Progress calculation" field. We recommend that you set this to be "Percent of competencies mastered", which means that if 90% of the competencies associated with a goal are mastered, the progress towards the entire goal is displayed as "90%", and the goal will be considered completed once all its competencies have been mastered. 

The alternative setting for this field is "Average of competency percentages", which means that a goal is only considered completed once all its competencies have reached a 100% rating (which is very difficult to achieve in most practical situations).