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Skills
Bianca Wetter avatar
Written by Bianca Wetter
Updated over a week ago

In today's rapidly evolving workplace, the ability to track and develop specific competencies can significantly enhance organizational and personal growth. Sana's "Skills" feature provides a robust framework for managing and advancing skills within your organization, tailored to meet both individual and company-wide developmental needs.

What are Skills?

Skills in Sana are defined capabilities or competencies that individuals in an organization can possess and develop. These skills can range from technical abilities like "C++ programming" to soft skills like "presenting". Each skill can be associated with different levels of proficiency, such as novice, intermediate, and expert, allowing for a structured development path. Descriptions for each skill level, written and decided by your organization, are shown on the Skill detail page, making it easier for learners to understand what is expected to achieve at each level.

💡 Skills and proficiency levels are customizable – they can be set up to match your organization's skills taxonomy and career framework

What is the Value of Skills?

  • Structured Up-skilling: Provide clearly defined up-skilling journeys for employees, helping them advance in key competencies.

  • Enhanced Content Relevance: By tagging courses with specific skills, learners can easily find the most relevant content for their development needs.

  • Recognition and Motivation: Through badges and other recognition mechanisms, employees are motivated to engage with learning content and achieve higher skill levels.

Ensure that skill levels are appropriately defined to reflect the actual competencies required at each stage. Misalignment can lead to confusion and misdirected learning efforts.

💡 Pro tip! Use level descriptions to align expectations

Use Cases for Skills

Up-skilling:

  • Definition: Improving existing skills or acquiring new skills relevant to one's current role.

  • Use-case example: A software developer might up-skill from understanding basic Python programming to mastering advanced data structures in Python.

  • Sana's Role: Allows organizations to map out these learning paths.

Re-skilling:

  • Definition: Ensuring that employees' skills stay relevant and effective in the face of rapid technological changes.

  • Use-case example: Regularly updating the skill sets of employees to prevent personnel obsolescence.

  • Sana's Role: Supports continuous learning and adaptation

Career Development:

  • Definition: Long-term growth and progression of employees within an organization.

  • Use-case example: Preparing a junior manager for senior management roles through leadership and strategic thinking skills development.

  • Sana's Role: Enables alignment of learning initiatives with the organization’s career progression framework.

By leveraging Sana's Skills feature, organizations can effectively support their workforce in adapting to changes, filling skill gaps, and preparing for future challenges through structured learning and development programs.

Skills vs. Programs

Skills and Programs in Sana serve different purposes and cater to distinct learning needs within an organization:

  • Skills:

    • Defined capabilities or competencies (e.g., "C++ programming", "presenting")

    • Associated with proficiency levels (novice, intermediate, expert)

    • Customizable to match organizational skills taxonomy and career framework

    • Ideal for continuous, open, and exploratory learning

    • Suitable for both hard and soft skills

    • Gamification with leaderboards

  • Programs:

    • Structured learning journeys with specific learning outcomes

    • Require sequential learning (complete one module before the next)

    • Best for structured paths like onboarding, certification, or leadership development

In summary, skills are designed for ongoing competency development, while Programs are for structured, sequential learning paths.


How to Create Skills

Step 1

To set up skills navigate to Manage > Skills > click the Settings button in the top right. Here, you will configure settings a few settings that are applied throughout all of the Skills in your organization:

Smart suggestions
When toggled on, our AI model will automatically and continuously scan you organization's content and tag them with relevant Skills and proficiency levels for admins to approve

Sequential unlocking

If enabled, learners are forced to complete the previous proficiency level before they are allowed to take courses at the next level.

Make skills available to learners

If enabled, the skill will be visible for learners in your org to subscribe

Display leaderboard

If enabled, a leaderboard of top badge earners will appear on the home page.

Define levels

Here, you define the proficiency levels that are available across all Skills in your organization, such as Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced.

Step 2

To add new skills you can either import a pre-defined skill from Sana's own library, or you can create a new custom skill based on your company's needs.

If you have external files or systems that handle your organization's skill taxonomy, it's possible to integrate this with Sana. Please contact your Engagement Manager to set this up.

Import skill from library

Click Browse skills in the top right of the skills manage page, select a skill you'd like to add then click 'Import skill'

Create a new custom Skill

Click 'New skill' in the top right and enter a name for the skill and descriptions then click save. Descriptions for each skill level is shown for the learner in the Skills overview page.

Step 3

Now that you have defined your organization's skills the next step is to add content.

To add content, navigate to the skill and click on the Manage button. If Smart suggestions is enabled, Sana's AI engine will start providing suggestions on relevant content for you to approve. To add content manually, click on the Add content button.

Level exam

The Level exam feature allows content to be used as examination steps or placement tests. By default, learners need to complete every content within proficiency level in order to receive the badge of completion for that level. By setting a content as "Level exam", admins can override this behavior so that only the Level exam content need to be completed in order for the learner to receive the badge.

Please note, that only one 'Level exam' is permitted per proficiency level.

Once you enable the level exam for the content by clicking the switch above, the below pop-up displays asking if you would like to proceed. Click continue to enable the 'Level exam'.


Subscribe a learner to a skill

As an admin you can subscribe a skill to a learner on their behalf by going to Manage > Skills > Select skill > Manage tab > scroll down to learners and click Add

You can then add a user or group and have the option to select a target level and achieved levels

Target level: is an expected level that want the learner to reach

Achieved level: automatically marks the user as complete up to that level

Once the user details are ready click Add

In the example below, Josh has a target level of gold and has been set with the achieved level of Silver, which will award him the silver badge

Once added the learner appears in the 'Users' table in the manage tab, where you can track their progress, see below example:


Learner view

Now that you have created the skill the learner can access this from their home page and start obtaining badges for their skill.

How to follow a skill

Once a skill has been created, learners can 'follow' the skill by clicking 'Browse skills' on your Sana home.

Then learners can select a skill or skills they're interested in following then click 'Save'

Enabled vs disabled leaderboard

In the Skills settings mentioned above, you can choose to have the leaderboard enabled or disabled for your learners. If enabled, a leaderboard of top badge earners will appear on the home page.

View for the learner if leaderboard is enabled:

  • The learner will see their own progress and the leaderboard of top badge earners in the organization

View for the learner if leaderboard is disabled:

  • The learner will see their own progress and what is needed to level up in those Skills

How to obtain badges

Once a learner has followed a skill they can then proceed to click on the title in the skills section of your home.

This will open the skill and display the available courses for that skill. Complete the courses within a badge level and to obtain the associated badge.

See the example below of how to follow a skill and then start working towards a badge


FAQ

What does 'Limited access' mean when I add a course to a skill and how do I remove it?

Skills are visible to everyone in your organization and due to this courses that are a part of a skill also require visibility throughout the organization if a learner needs to complete all courses to obtain badges for that skill. This 'Limited access' warning lets you know that some learners may not have access to this course

The only way to remove this 'Limited access' status is by opening the course manage page and changing the share settings to 'Visible to all'

How can I ensure that the skills defined are aligned with my organization’s needs?

Engage with various stakeholders including HR, department heads, and team leaders to capture a comprehensive view of the skills essential for your organization’s success. Regularly review and update the skills as needed to adapt to changing organizational goals and market conditions.

When should I or shouldn't I use Skills?

When to use skills:

  • For structured learning programs with a clear framework of skills and competencies.

  • For continuous development and personalized learning paths.

  • Relevant for both hard and soft skills.

When not to use skills:

  • When the learning objective requires a strict sequential learning journey, a program might be more suitable.

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