The Skills Base Changelog
Check out what’s new in Skills Base. If you’re interested to see anything in action, schedule a time to talk to the team.
The year of AI skills intelligence is here
The next generation of the ‘Ask Sam’ AI assistant is now available for customers licensed for the Skill Query module.
You can now interrogate the data within your Skills Base instance, getting help across almost any problem:
- Finding the right talent for your upcoming projects
- Analyzing the effectiveness of training
- Exploring internal career mobility pathways
- and much more.
Sam is now being Powered by Anthropic’s Claude and we have worked tirelessly to ensure Security, Privacy and Safety is top of mind. This includes a completely reengineered back-end Built on Amazon Bedrock, with the granular security group permissions customers expect of Skills Base.
New Sam Gadgets on Dashboards
Currently in an opt-in beta offering for customers.
The New ‘Ask Sam’ gadget appears on org, person, team, role, and location dashboards, with suggested insight question prompts that are relevant to the entity being viewed.
Additional Minor Changes & Updates
- Enhancements to the ‘Course Mappings’ data importer
- Enhancements to the ‘Teams’ data importer
Personalize Targets for Individuals with Custom Targets
You can now set a custom target for any skill a person has, permanently overriding any target inherited from their role or team.
This feature is particularly useful when you want to have a mix of standardized skill targets and personalized targets for specific individuals.
This approach allows you to have a flexible and tailored competency target configuration that can adapt to the unique needs of everyone in your organization.
More language options for users!
Continuing on with our localization efforts we’re happy to add a few more to the list!
Arabic
🇨🇿 Czech
🇵🇹 Portuguese
🇫🇮 Finnish
Additional Minor Changes & Updates
- You can now bulk edit the “Login enabled” field to enable or disable login for people in bulk.
- You can now start (or continue) an assessment from the “Actions” menu in a person's dashboard
- There have been general improvements to some global User Interface features
A New Skills Assessment Experience
The Skills Assessment experience is at the heart of Skills Base, and we’ve been working behind the scenes to give it a complete overhaul for Desktop and Mobile.
Over the last few months we have been working with a select few customers to ensure it’s ready, and now we’re making it available to all customers.
As a part of this rollout users will be able to easily toggle between the “classic experience” and “new assessment experience”.
Administrators can also set the “new assessment experience” to default.
More language options for users!
Continuing on with our localization efforts we’re happy to add a few more to the list!
Español (Latinoamérica)
Greek 
Japanese
Chinese ( Simplified )
🇰🇷 Korean
Visual Improvements to your Skills Matrix
Available for all users and account types, we have made improvements to the visual layout of the dashboard-style skills matrix, and career mobility report.
More language options for users!
We have started work on more localization options for Skills Base customers. This month we’re happy to announce the release of 🇪🇸 Spanish (España) Translations.
Additional Minor Changes & Updates
- You can now view a list of “Skills in common” with another person. Click one of the counts in the “People with similar skills” gadget to bring up the list.
- You can now exclude some roles from self-service selection
The beginning for AI-powered skills intelligence
The next iteration of Sam — released in January — can now answer questions from an organization’s Skills Base data, by generating and executing insights using the new feature — Skill Query.
In addition to this, we’ve updated the User interface, and ability to create new “conversations”.
This functionality requires the ‘Skill Query’ feature module, which is available for Ultimate license types.
Access for non-administrators is governed by a new security group permission: ‘Ask Sam > Data Queries’.
This is now in the second beta phase and over the coming weeks and months will likely change and improve.
Skill Query is another vital part of the Skills Base product roadmap.
It is a new way to query your data, and will become the foundation for future AI insights, and reporting functionality.
Skill Query is currently in beta and more suited for power-users of Skills Base.
Small Improvements to People Finder
As a way to more easily see match criteria for people finder results, we have made some slight tweaks to the UI.
Additional Minor Changes & Updates
- You can now import Course Assignments (training plan items) using the Data Importer
- ‘Administrator’ can now be selected as the security group when inviting a new user. It’s no longer necessary to give lesser permissions initially.
Introducing Module Administration
The new Module-based licensing screen allows administrators to see which features they have available and turn them on/off.
They can also see the feature modules that are not included with their current license.
Additional Minor Changes & Updates
- The signup form to create a new instance has been re-designed
Simplifying Average Skill Level Calculations
Skills Base historically supported two different methods for calculating average skill and interest levels:
- The “Strict average” calculation method factored zeros into averages, so that the average of 4 and 0 is calculated as 2.
- The “Relevant skills” calculation method ignored zeros in averages, so that the average of 4 and 0 is calculated as 4.
The “Elimination of Calculation Methods” change includes 3 parts:
- Removal of “Calculation Method” options, so that all Skills Base instances conform to the “Strict average” calculation approach.
- Addition of an “N/A” rating option, in addition to the existing zero rating in the Master Rating Scheme configuration.
- Conversion of zeros to N/A for any customer that is currently using zeros to represent N/A.
This has now been released for Australian, United States and European Users.
Additional Minor Changes & Updates
- You can now add custom fields to skill categories
- Custom Fields for Skill categories is available in the report builder
- You can now export to CSV from the course mappings table
Hi Sam, Phase One for AI-driven Skills Management
Introducing Sam, the first step in AI-powered skills management software. This current beta iteration is focused specifically on supporting Skills Base administrators in setting up and managing their accounts. In the coming months the team will be working heavily on supporting tools and infrastructure so you can start directly referencing your own data.
UI Improvements for the People PDF Export
Your people’s skill profiles can now be exported with similar modern UI features that are experienced within Skills Base.
Additional Minor Changes & Updates
- The character limit available for custom fields related to courses has been increased
- Last "Self review date" and "Supervisor review date" columns can now be seen in "Assess people" and the "People directory"
Product Update Archives
Look back at some of the changes made to Skills Base.
Product Updates 2023
Introducing the Skills Base Data Importer
We are excited to announce the release of the Skills Base Data Importer, a powerful new tool designed to streamline the process of importing and managing data within the Skills Base platform. This latest update is focused on enhancing user experience, improving data accuracy, and increasing the efficiency of data management processes.
Additional Minor Changes & Updates
- You can now show target levels within an assessment
A more Personalized touch for People Finder
Before we look to make some much bigger reporting changes in 2024, we’ve given people finder a cleaner look. Anyone in your organization with a profile picture will now be displayed in the results.
Additional Minor Changes & Updates
- We have temporarily disabled the ability to enable zero ratings in the lead-in to a future update
Minor Changes & Updates
- Added the ability to include People custom fields in the Qualification Assignments export
Improvements to the heat matrix
You can now add filters to your heat matrix reports to include specific people only.
Additional Minor Changes & Updates
- We have implemented a new framework internally for logging activity across accounts.
- ‘Email’ is now an optional column that can be shown on the Qualification Assignments directory
Introducing Skill Points
Skill Points are calculated based on the skill levels individuals have achieved across different competencies within Skills Base. This approach offers a quantitative measure of an employee’s overall skill set, making it easier for managers to identify strengths, areas for improvement, and opportunities for career development.
Additional Minor Changes & Updates
- Added the support for multiple API keys
Introducing Credly Workforce Integration
You can now sync badges from Credly to a Skills Base organization as Qualification records
This integration must be configured by Support and you will require an account with Credly and a subscription to the Credly Workforce product
Additional Minor Changes & Updates
- Added the ability for administrators to add custom fields to qualifications