How can I track job roles, skills and competencies?

Traditionally, training reporting begins after a user is enrolled in a training module - when were they enrolled, what is the due date and have they completed the module?

The Tribal Habits Roles feature allows for improved reporting on training requirements as it allows reporting to begin before enrolment.

The Roles feature allows you to assign a job role to a user that outlines a required set of skills for that role. The user then needs to seek out training to meet those skill requirements. This means that reporting begins as soon as the role is assigned and can measure training that occurs inside or outside your Tribal Habits portal.

THIS FEATURE REQUIRES AN ACTIVE 50 PLAN OR LARGER

Please note that the Roles feature is only available on Active 50 or larger plans. This feature is not available on smaller plans (such as Starter) or legacy plans (older monthly plans). Please contact our team at [email protected] if you would like access to this feature but it is not activated in your portal.

Expand the headings below for more information.

How do I enable the Roles feature?

First, Roles must be enabled in your plan (see above).
Second, Super Admins can then go to Admin → Account → Subscription to enable Roles.

Note: Only Super Admins can enable or disable the Roles feature.

What is the process for setting up Roles?

Let's briefly review the process and then dive into detail in the sections below.

Create your roles. Each role represents a position description in your organisation. Roles contain required competencies. Competencies represent a bundle of one or more required skills. So a role might require, for example, three competencies with those competencies requiring, say, a total of 12 skills (so four skills in each competency). Once the user has attained the 12 required skills, then they have met the requirements of that role.
Assign roles to your users. Next, your users need their assigned roles. Users can have up to five assigned roles.
Assign skills to your Tribal Habits knowledge. Now users need a way to attain their skills. The first way is to complete knowledge within Tribal Habits which have assigned skills. So the next step is to assign appropriate skills to topics, articles and/or pathways in your Tribal Habits portal.
Enable external knowledge recording. Finally, users need a way to attain skills outside your Tribal Habits portal. They can do this by recording External Knowledge, which will give them the option to select from a list of their required skills and assign that to a recorded item.
Report on role attainment. You can then use a variety of reports to view attainment of roles and skills, both now and in the future (as modules or knowledge expires), as well as by individual users.

Below we discuss each step in more detail. We then present two examples, with detailed images, for both employee roles and qualification tracking.

Detailed steps for setting up roles

Expand each heading below for detailed steps to set roles up within your Tribal Habits portal.

Step 1 - Create your roles

Let's consider how roles are structured in Tribal Habits.

Role. A role represents a single position description - 'Sales Manager' or 'Financial Officer', for example. A role would typically equate to a job title. However, a role may also represent a secondary requirement assigned to someone - say, 'Fire Warden'. A role may also represent a qualification if your organisation is selling training to customers - e.g. 'Cert IV in Assessment and Training'. Each person can have up to five roles assigned to them. Roles consist of one or more required competencies. Note: You can also create or update Roles via the Roles CSV bulk upload option.
Competency. A competency represents a collection of required skills. So a competency represents a 'part' of a role. Competencies can be used across multiple roles so, for example, you might have a 'Manager Skills' competency which contains all the required skills for any manager in your organisation. Every role for a management position could use that same competency (plus then have other unique competency requirements for each position). Competencies can have a single skill or dozens of skills. Note: You can also create or update Competencies via the Competencies CSV bulk upload option.
Skill. A skill represents a single, defined required piece of knowledge. A skill is the smallest element in the role/competency/skill model and it is also the element that can be attained directly by a user - i.e. a user attains skills, and those skills count towards competencies and roles. A user cannot directly attain a role or competency. Skills can be utilised across many different competencies and attained by many different topics, articles, pathways or external learning. Note: You can also create or update Skills via the Skills CSV bulk upload option.

Ultimately, an organisation may have many roles, many more competencies and many, many more skills.

Roles, competencies and skills share some common features:

Title. Each has a short title.
Description (Optional). Each can have a longer description. This is particularly important for skills, to clearly outline what is required to attain a skill.
Code (Optional). Each can have a code. This can be useful when utilising roles for qualifications, as you can assign codes to each skill, competency or role as per the qualification and its units.
Active. Each can be active or inactive. Inactive means the item will no longer be available for selection (but stored for future use).

At the moment, roles, competencies and skills are created manually in the Admin area of your portal at Account → Roles. There are links to create and manage all aspects of roles.

Step 2 - Assign roles to your users

With your roles created, you can now assign them to your users. Each user can be assigned up to five roles. Roles can be assigned by:

Manual assignment. Admins can edit the profile of any user to assign or remove roles in any of the five available role positions.
Bulk upload. Admins can use the Upload People function to upload roles into designated Role 1 to Role 5 fields. When uploading, simply enter the exact name of the role into the cell. Note: You can only upload role titles you have already created within the portal (so create your roles before the upload).

Once assigned, roles are visible in your portal's list of all users (at Admin → People) and on user profiles (on both the Profile and Roles tabs).

Step 3 - Assign skills to your knowledge in Tribal Habits

With roles created and assigned, the easiest way for users to attain their required skills is by completing knowledge within your Tribal Habits portal - topics, articles or pathways. So your next step is to assign skills to that Tribal Habits knowledge.

You can assign one or more skills to any topic, article or pathway. The same skill can also be assigned to different topics, articles or pathways to allow users to attain a skill in a variety of methods.

Skills are assigned to topics, articles or pathways in the same way as categories.

Add or remove to individual topics, articles or pathways. In this case, view the topic, article or pathway in Admin and select the 'Settings' tab. Click 'Edit General' in the 'General' section, then click 'Set Skills' and select or deselect skills accordingly. When satisfied, click 'Save'.
Add in bulk to many topics or articles. Alternatively, view your list of topics or articles in 'Knowledge' and use the checkboxes to select one or more items. You can then use the 'Bulk Action' button to select 'Add Skills'. Select the skills you want to assign, then click 'Set Skills'. Note: this process only works for adding skills, there is no bulk action to remove skills.

How do topics, articles and pathways differ in relation to skills?
You can assign skills to topics and articles, as well as to pathways. You should therefore consider if a skill is attained by an individual topic or only when a pathway is completed.

You may allow learners to acquire different skills as they complete different topics in a pathway (in which case, assign skills to each topic and not to the pathway), or only when a learner completes an entire pathway (in which case, do not assign skills to the topics and instead assign all the skills to the pathway).

When is a skill attained?
Skills are attained when an explorer completes a topic, article or pathway.

This means that skills are NOT attained simply by enrolling someone in a topic, article or pathway.
It also means that skills are NOT attained if someone has already completed a topic, article or pathway and you later assign a skill to that topic, article or pathway - since those users have already completed the knowledge. Assigning a skill (or removing a skill) from knowledge does not impact enrolments that are already completed.
If you want to apply a skill to enrolments that are already completed, you can use the -UPDATE enrolment code and the Upload People process to do this. Learn more in this article.

Step 4 - Enable external knowledge recording

A second way for users to attain a skill is by recording external knowledge. By default, this option is enabled for all users.

When a user records knowledge on their profile, they will have the option to assign one of their required skills to that knowledge.

Note: Users will only be able to select from skills required as part of the roles they have been assigned.

Step 5 - Report on role attainment

At this point, your users have assigned roles and can now attain their required skills. As this occurs, you can monitor role attainment in several ways.

When admins view a user, there will be a Roles tab for users with assigned roles. This tab shows the user's progress towards attaining their required roles. Each required skill will be shown as:

Missing - The skill has not been attained.
Current - The skill has been attained and has not expired.
Expired - The skill has been attained by has been expired.

Note: Only current skills are counted towards overall role attainment.

There are also a variety of reports in the Analytics area which admins can use to review skill and role attainment in more detail, these include the Skills Attained and Skills Progression reports, however, other reports related to enrolments and training can also use 'Role' filters.

Examples

Let's explore two example use cases for using Roles in your Tribal Habits portal.

Example 1 - Employee roles

In this first example, let's say an organisation has two roles - 'Sales Manager' and 'Operations Manager'.

We can initially create those two roles with no assigned competencies.

Next, we can determine the required competencies. We end up creating these four competencies, with no assigned skills for now.

Both roles need Manager Compliance.
Both roles need Management Skills.
The Sales Manager role needs specific skills in Sales Management.
The Operation Manager role needs specific skills in Project Management.

Next, we create all the required skills for these competencies. Let's say we end up with these skills...

We can now assign those skills into their competencies.

We can then assign the competencies to the roles.

We can then assign roles to users (via a user's profile in the screenshot example below) which can then be viewed on the 'Roles' tab of each user's profile.

So in this example, we can see the Sales Manager role is assigned but the competencies and skills are all in the 'Missing' status at this point.

Next, we can assign some skills to some internal knowledge in Tribal Habits. In this case, we have a Consultative selling and sales relationships topic and we can assign it with the 'Sales coaching' and Sales KPIs' skills.

Finally, as the sales manager completes that topic, they attain that skill and their role attainment improves - they are now 28% towards their role.

As time passes and the user completes more training and records more knowledge, they will continue to improve their role attainment.

Example 2 - Qualification roles

In this example, let's use Roles to help manage a qualification. Let's say we are creating a 'Certificate III in Tribal Habits'. So that will be the role.

The Certificate III consists of four units of competency, with each unit of competency consisting of a number of modules (skills). In this example, the competencies are 'Creating Knowledge', 'Managing Knowledge', 'Managing Users' and 'Reporting on Knowledge'.

The skills could then be things like 'Creating new topics', 'Enrolling users in knowledge', 'Managing user data', 'Running training analytics' and anything else that is a skill related to each of the competencies required to fulfill the Certificate III qualification. Basically, we bundle up skills (as modules), competencies (as competencies) and roles (as the qualification).

We can then assign our role/qualification to customers to better track how they are progressing towards a qualification that may span across several pathways and involve external knowledge or assessments.