Workday Skills Cloud

Workday announced the immediate availability of the Skills Cloud function for HCM, the first way customers will be able to take advantage of the machine learning features in Workday Graph.  The Skills Cloud offers a curated list of more than 150,000 common workforce skills. Workday pared this list down from more than 20 million crowdsourced skills, that included many skills that were similar in nature or followed poor naming practices.  Customers can leverage the Workday Skills Cloud listing in their own tenant across worker profiles, skills reporting, and talent dashboards.

Using Skills Cloud can save time for Workday administrators by providing a strong starting point for defining skills in their tenant, and reducing the amount of time spent in the “Maintain Skills” task.  Prior to the introduction of this functionality, end users would frequently enter new “crowdsourced” skills that were similar to existing defined values. In order to facilitate reporting, administrators would often be forced to identify and remove duplicate skills.  Although customers might still have the need to define specific skills for their own tenant, they will automatically benefit from continued improvements to the Skills Cloud, and an improved end-user search experience.

In order to “opt in” to the Skills Cloud functionality, customers need to sign Workday’s Innovation Services agreement.  This allows Workday to gather information about how skills are used by its customers. After opting in, customers have the ability to define the “precedence” of how skills will appear in search results.  For customers that already have small, well-defined list of skills defined in Workday, it may make sense to give priority to the skills already in the tenant. For anyone else, relying on the Skills Cloud data could be a great time saver.  Workday has also provided guidance on how existing skills can be cleaned up using the new “Edit Skills” task and through web service operations.