Skills & Credentials App Overview

Skills & Credentials

1. What it is

Skills & Credentials tracks what your employees know, what they are certified to do, and when those credentials expire. It gives admins a single catalog of skills, certifications, and licenses; connects them to role requirements so you can see coverage gaps; and alerts you before a credential lapses.

• Enablement: licensed, opt-in. An admin enables the app from the Apps Marketplace.
• What it is not: this app does not deliver training. Course enrollment and completion live in the Training app; when a course awards a skill, the holding appears here automatically.

2. Standing it up

1. Go to Apps Marketplace → Skills & Credentials → Enable. The app appears in the sidebar.
2. Open Catalog and add your first entries. Each entry is one of three kinds — Skill, Certification, or License. You can type them one at a time, import a CSV, or load an industry template.
3. For certifications and licenses, set a standard validity period (in months) so expiration dates are prefilled when someone earns the credential.
4. Go to Settings → Role Requirements and map which skills and certifications each role type needs, with a minimum proficiency level and whether the requirement is critical.
5. To let employees add their own skills, leave the Require Verification Before Profile Visibility setting on (the default). Employees can submit skills and upload documents; each submission enters the Action Center → Pending Verifications queue for admin review before it is visible on their profile.
6. Confirm it worked: open Dashboard. You should see your catalog count, the staff coverage percentage, and any pending verifications.

What silently does nothing until both sides are wired: role requirements only produce gap analysis when employees also have holdings recorded against those same catalog entries. If you define requirements but nobody has the skills assigned, every role shows 0% coverage. Populate holdings — via batch assign, CSV import, or employee self-service — before drawing conclusions from the dashboard.

3. How it fits together

The catalog and its three kinds

Every entry in your catalog is exactly one of three kinds:

• Skill — a proficiency-rated capability with no expiry (e.g., “Forklift Operation”, “Spanish Fluency”).
• Certification — a credential issued by an authority, with an issue date and an expiration date (e.g., “CPR Certification”).
• License — same as a certification but distinguished in reporting and compliance (e.g., “Registered Nurse License”, “CDL Class A”).

Both certifications and licenses require a validity period and go through the same expiry-tracking pipeline. Skills do not expire.

Worked example: your catalog has three entries: “Forklift Operation” (skill), “OSHA 30-Hour” (certification, 60-month validity), and “CDL Class A” (license, 24-month validity). When an admin assigns OSHA 30-Hour to an employee and enters an issue date of 2026-01-15, the system prefills the expiration at 2031-01-15. Thirty days before that date, the admin and the employee’s manager are notified.

Holdings and proficiency

A holding is one employee’s record of one catalog entry. Each holding carries a proficiency level from 1 (Basic) to 5 (Expert). The default proficiency labels are Basic, Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, and Expert, but an admin can rename and redefine each level under Settings → Proficiency Levels.

For certifications and licenses, the holding also carries a certification date, expiration date, and optional certification number. Each renewal creates a new period in the credential’s history, so you can answer “was this person certified on date X?” without losing the original record.

Verification

When Require Verification Before Profile Visibility is on, a self-reported skill is created inactive and enters the admin verification queue. An admin can approve (the holding becomes active and visible) or reject it (it stays inactive). When the setting is off, self-reported holdings are active immediately.

Employees can also propose skills that are not yet in the catalog. These proposals appear in the same queue, where an admin can map the proposal to an existing catalog entry or accept it as a new entry.

Role requirements and gap analysis

Each role type in your organization can have required skills mapped against it, each with a minimum proficiency level and a critical flag. The People Graph and Team Readiness surfaces use these requirements to compute per-person and per-role coverage, surface under-covered skills, and identify who could fill a gap.

Requirements can be scoped to specific locations. A requirement marked for all sites applies everywhere; one scoped to a site applies only to employees whose home location matches.

Issuing authorities

Certifications and licenses can be linked to an issuing authority — the credentialing body that granted the credential (e.g., American Heart Association, a state nursing board). Admins manage these under Settings → Issuing Authorities. System-defined authorities are shared across all tenants and are read-only; tenant-created authorities can be edited or deleted. An authority can carry a verification URL template so the system generates a one-click verification link from the credential number.

Four authority types are available: Government, Professional body, Vendor, and Internal.

Credential documents and the audit trail

Employees can upload supporting documents (PDF, JPG, PNG, DOC, or DOCX, up to 10 MB each) when they add or renew a credential. Catalog entries can be marked Requires document upload, which blocks submission without an attached file. Every download is audit-logged. When the Require identity verification for credential documents setting is turned on, the viewer must re-verify their identity before the download proceeds.

Integration with other apps

• Training: when a course or learning path awards a skill, completing it creates the holding automatically (source: training).
• Scheduling: scheduling groups can filter by skill, so only qualified employees appear in a shift pool. Changing a holding triggers a background refresh of the affected groups.
• Practice Hub: a certifiable practice scenario can mint a holding on a passing attempt (source: practice).
• Skill Swap: employees can offer to teach a skill they hold, and the “Close Your Gaps” panel on My Readiness links to peer teachers.

4. Running it

Reviewing pending verifications

1. Go to Action Center → Pending Verifications.
2. Filter by skill or location if needed.
3. For a standard claim, click Verify to approve or Reject with a note.
4. For a proposed new skill (no matching catalog entry), click Review to map it to an existing entry or accept it as new.

The employee is notified of the decision.

Reviewing inferred skills

When Skills Inference is enabled under Competency Assessment, the system proposes skills for employees based on their activity. Proposals below the confidence floor appear in Action Center → Skill Reviews for manager review. A manager can accept (mints a verified holding) or dismiss.

Tracking expiring credentials

Go to Action Center → Expiring to see all certifications and licenses expiring within 30, 60, or 90 days. Filter by location. Export to CSV for offline follow-up.

Processing bonus incentives

If a catalog entry is marked Bonus eligible, newly earned certifications appear in Action Center → Bonus Incentives. Mark each as processed once the payout is handled outside the system. Back-dated imports (certification date more than 30 days before the record was created) are excluded from this queue.

Batch assigning skills

Go to Assignments → Batch Assign to assign one skill or certification to multiple employees at once. Select the catalog entry, choose a proficiency level, and pick the employees. For skills that require a document upload, batch-assigned employees can upload their document later from their personal My Skills page.

Running reports

Go to Reports for top-line metrics: catalog size, staff coverage, expiring credentials, role coverage, and the top 10 most-held entries. Use the As-of date field to check how many credentials were valid on a past date — useful for incident investigations.

Exporting credentials

From Reports → Credentials Export, download a CSV of every verified credential in the organization, including employee name, job title, skill, proficiency, verification date, expiry, and status.

What employees see

Employees open My Skills to view their holdings, see what is expiring, and add or renew a credential. My Readiness shows their current proficiency, gaps against their role’s requirements, and learning content that can close each gap. Explore is the catalog browser — employees can search by kind and see learning resources attached to each entry. Credential Wallet is a printable summary of their certifications and licenses. All employee surfaces except Explore have mobile-optimized views.

5. Settings

Setting	Where	Default	What it changes
Skills Tracking	Settings → Features	On	Enables the Skills tab in the catalog and skill-type holdings
Certification Management	Settings → Features	On	Enables certification and license tracking, expiry alerts, and the verification queue
Competency Assessment	Settings → Features	On	Enables the People Graph, Team Readiness, and Skills Inference surfaces
Training Records	Settings → Features	On	Shows training-source badges on holdings and links to the originating course
Require Verification Before Profile Visibility	Settings → Features	On	Self-reported holdings start inactive and must be approved before they appear on the employee’s profile
Require identity verification for credential documents	Settings → Features	Off	Adds a step-up identity check before downloading uploaded credential evidence
AI Agent Enabled	Settings (app configuration)	On	Enables the in-app AI agent for skills-related questions
Daily admin digest for expiring credentials	Settings (app configuration)	Off	Replaces individual expiry alerts with a single daily summary email to admins

Notification settings

Under Settings → Notifications, each event can be toggled on or off, with separate checkboxes for the employee, their manager, and all app admins, plus optional extra email addresses. Events include: certification expiring soon (default lead time: 30 days), certification expired, certification assigned, self-claim submitted, self-claim decided, and role gap detected.

6. More help

• Skills & Credentials FAQ — specific setup and operating questions
• Ask AI — the assistant answers questions about Skills & Credentials from these articles.