​

Overview

This tutorial is designed for executives, senior leaders, and HR leaders who need a strategic, organization-wide view of workforce capabilities. This includes roles such as Chief People Officers, VPs of Talent, Directors of Learning & Development, and any leader responsible for making decisions about workforce readiness, skills investment, or talent strategy. SkillsDB surfaces the quantitative data behind your workforce — proficiency levels, skills gaps, training coverage, certification compliance, and expert distribution — so leaders can move from gut-feel to evidence-based decisions. By the end of this tutorial, you will know how to:

• Get a real-time picture of your organization’s skill health
• Identify where critical gaps exist between current capabilities and role requirements
• Locate your subject-matter experts and high performers
• Track certification compliance across the organization
• Review training coverage by team, role, or skill
• Monitor assessment participation and completion
• Export clean data for board presentations, planning cycles, or HR reviews

---

​

Prerequisites

To access organization-wide data in SkillsDB, you need:

• Admin access — Many of the org-wide views (the “All” tabs across skills, training, and certifications) require administrator-level permissions. If you have a Manager role, you will see data scoped to your direct reports and your organizational hierarchy (“My Org” view). Contact your SkillsDB administrator to confirm or adjust your access level.
• Skills data entered — The analytics in SkillsDB are only as rich as the underlying data. At minimum, your organization should have job roles (careers) defined with skills mapped, and at least one completed assessment cycle. Many executives use this tutorial as a prompt to confirm data completeness before drawing conclusions.

---

​

Step 1: Assess Your Organization’s Skill Health

The first question any workforce strategy starts with is: What skills does our organization have right now? SkillsDB answers this through skills analytics tied to your job role library.

​

View skills health by career

A career in SkillsDB is a job role — for example, “Software Engineer” or “Operations Manager.” Each career has skills mapped to it with benchmark proficiency levels. The Career Overview shows you how your people measure against those benchmarks.

1. Navigate to Library > Careers from the left sidebar.
2. Select a career to open its detail page.
3. Select the Overview tab.

The Overview tab displays: | Top performers | People with the highest average manager-assessed grades | | Bottom performers | People with the most development opportunity | | Proficiency distribution | A visual chart showing how grades are spread across the skill | The bar chart on the Overview tab compares employee self-assessed grades, manager-assessed grades, and the role’s benchmark — all in a single view. When self-grades and manager grades diverge significantly, that is often a signal worth exploring in a deeper conversation with that team’s manager.

​

View skill-level analytics

For any individual skill, you can drill into how your entire organization performs on that competency:

1. Navigate to Library > Skills from the left sidebar.
2. Select a skill to open its detail page.
3. Select the Analytics tab.

The Analytics tab breaks down performance by division, department, team, and job role — so you can see whether a skills gap is isolated to one part of the business or systemic across the organization.

---

​

Step 2: Identify and Prioritize Skills Gaps

Knowing you have gaps is the first step. Knowing which gaps are most critical — and what their magnitude is — is what drives investment decisions.

​

Use the skills matrix to see coverage at a glance

The skills matrix for a career shows every person in that role mapped against every skill, with their proficiency level color-coded against the benchmark. This is the most effective single view for identifying coverage patterns.

1. Navigate to Library > Careers from the left sidebar.
2. Select a career.
3. Select Skills Matrix from the career’s navigation tabs.

The matrix displays people as rows and skills as columns. Each cell shows that person’s proficiency grade with a color indicator:

• Green — At or above benchmark
• Yellow — Approaching benchmark
• Red — Below benchmark
• Empty — Not yet assessed

When you see a column with predominantly red or empty cells, that is a high-priority skills gap — a competency your role requires that your team broadly lacks. When you see a row with predominantly red cells, that is an individual development opportunity.

​

Prioritize gaps by business impact

Not all gaps carry equal risk. Prioritize by asking:

• Which skills are on the critical path for upcoming projects or business goals?
• Which gaps affect the most people (wide gaps vs. deep individual gaps)?
• Which skills have no internal experts — meaning there is no one to train others if someone leaves?

Use the Skill Overview page (Library > Skills > [Skill]) to check the Experts and Mentors counts for any skill. A skill with zero experts and a large gap count is a strategic vulnerability.

---

​

Step 3: Find Your Experts and High Performers

Understanding where expertise lives in your organization is essential for succession planning, project staffing, internal knowledge transfer, and retention risk assessment.

​

Search for experts by skill

1. Navigate to Explore Your Org from the left sidebar.
2. Select Find Experts from the scope selector.
3. Search for a skill name or use the filters to narrow by department, role, or flag type.

The search results show every person in your organization who holds an Expert or Mentor flag for that skill, along with their proficiency grade and team. This is your internal talent map for any given competency.

​

Review top performers by career

From the Career Overview tab, the Top Performers section lists the people with the highest average manager-assessed grades in that role. This list is valuable for:

• Identifying internal candidates for promotion or expanded responsibility
• Spotting individuals who could serve as mentors or internal trainers
• Building a succession shortlist for critical roles

---

​

Step 4: Track Certification Compliance at Scale

For organizations in regulated industries — healthcare, finance, manufacturing, safety-critical operations — certification compliance is a board-level concern, not just an HR process. SkillsDB gives you a real-time compliance view across your entire organization.

​

View org-wide certification status

1. Navigate to My Team > Certifications from the left sidebar.
2. Select the All tab to see certifications across the entire organization.

The certifications table displays: | Status | Assigned, Awaiting Approval, Approved, Denied, Expired, or Expiring Soon | | Expiration date | When the certification expires | | Labels | Any custom labels applied to this certification record |

​

Filter for compliance risk

Use the Status and Expires filter dropdowns to focus on records that need attention:

• Expired — Certifications that have already passed their expiration date
• Expiring Soon — Certifications expiring within the next 30 days

A high count of expired or expiring-soon certifications in a critical role is a compliance risk that warrants immediate escalation. Use the Export button to pull this data to Excel for reporting.

​

Understand expiration thresholds

SkillsDB automatically calculates expiration status based on the expiration date configured on each certification:

• “Expiring Soon” appears when the expiration date is within 30 days
• “Expired” appears when the expiration date has passed

Renewing a certification requires the employee to submit updated documentation, which a manager or administrator then approves. History is preserved — each renewal creates a new record while retaining the original. See Managing Certifications and Certification Tracking for the full renewal workflow.

---

​

Step 5: Understand Training Coverage

Training coverage answers a different question than skills proficiency: not what can people do, but what formal training have they received? For roles where training records matter for compliance, audits, or safety standards, the Training Matrix is your primary tool.

​

Review the Training Matrix

The Training Matrix shows every person in your organization mapped against every role-assigned skill, with the date they last received approved training for each.

1. Navigate to My Team > Training > Training Matrix from the left sidebar.
2. Select the All tab for org-wide data, or My Org for your hierarchy.
3. Use the career or department filters to scope the view to the area you want to analyze.

Each cell in the matrix shows:

• The training date for that person-skill combination
• An Expiring Soon (yellow) or Expired (red) badge if the training has a configured expiration period

Skills with many empty or expired cells represent areas where formal training has not kept pace with requirements.

​

Review All Training Activity

For a chronological record of training delivery across your organization:

1. Navigate to My Team > Training from the left sidebar.
2. Select the All Activity tab.
3. Filter by division, department, or job role to narrow the view.
4. Select Export to download the data to Excel.

This view is useful for audit purposes — you can demonstrate that specific people received specific training on specific dates, with trainer names included.

---

​

Step 6: Monitor Assessment Participation

Assessment completion rates tell you whether your skills data is current and comprehensive. An organization with strong skills analytics depends on consistent assessment participation. Executives can monitor completion at a macro level.

​

Check assessment completion rates

1. Navigate to Manage > Assessments from the left sidebar.
2. Select an active or recently completed assessment.
3. Select Completion Report to open the status report.

The completion report shows each employee’s assessment status — To Do, In Progress, Completed, or Excluded — along with their manager and department. The status distribution chart at the top gives you an at-a-glance completion rate. What low completion rates signal:

• To Do — The assessment was assigned but not started. Consider nudging managers to prompt their teams.
• In Progress — Started but not submitted. Often means employees are partway through and need time or a reminder.
• Excluded — The employee was intentionally excluded from this cycle (e.g., recently hired, on leave).

Use the Export button on the completion report to pull a full list for any manager or department follow-up.

---

​

Step 7: Export and Share Workforce Insights

SkillsDB data is designed to be actionable — inside the platform and in external reporting formats. Most major views support Excel export so you can build executive decks, board presentations, and planning models from live data.

​

What can be exported

​

How to export

On any page with export capability:

1. Apply the filters you want to scope the data (department, career, status, etc.).
2. Optionally, select specific rows if you only want a subset.
3. Select Export from the table controls.
4. An .xlsx file downloads automatically.

​

Building an executive workforce dashboard

Many organizations use SkillsDB exports as the data source for an external executive dashboard (in tools like PowerBI, Tableau, or Excel). A recommended cadence:

• Monthly: Export certification compliance data and flag any Expiring Soon or Expired records
• Quarterly: Export skills matrix data by career to track gap trends over time
• Post-assessment cycle: Export the completion report and skills proficiency data to refresh the org-wide skills baseline

---

​

Common Questions

---

​

Related Articles

---

​

Need Help?