Concept: Automated Skill Management
Overview
Workday Skills Cloud performs regular automated background processes to clean up and maintain skills in your tenant. These background processes perform:
- Duplicate Skill Management
- Synonym Skill Management
- Deprecated Skill Management
These background processes reduce the number of skills in your tenant that are synonyms or duplicates of Skills Cloud skills, and increase the usability of skill data in your tenant. Once you enable Skills Cloud in your tenant, you can't opt out of these background processes.
The background processes evaluate 1,000 skills in each hourly batch, so tenants with large numbers of skills or new skill translations will require additional time to complete the duplicate and synonymous skill conversions. Workday recommends waiting a minimum of 1 week after first enabling Skills Cloud before reviewing your remaining tenanted skills.
Duplicate Skill Management
Duplicate Skill Management reduces the number of crowdsourced and maintained skills in your tenant. Workday performs a series of background jobs that regularly evaluates all skills in your tenant for any that are exact matches to a Skills Cloud skill. If a match is found, Workday automatically:
- Creates the canonical Skills Cloud skill in your tenant if it doesn’t already exist.
- Migrates usages of the duplicate tenanted skill to the matching Skills Cloud skill.
- Keeps the highest entered skill level for the Skills Cloud skill.
- Deletes the duplicate tenanted skill.
The Duplicate Skill Management background process runs every hour and identifies skills as duplicates if they're an exact textual match to a Skills Cloud skill. Workday replaces duplicate skills with the Skills Cloud skill of the same name and removes them from the
Maintain Skills
and Find Skill
reports. If there's a merged skill on a duplicate skill, Workday removes the merged skill from the Maintain Skills
report.Workday converts translations of duplicate skills in languages supported by Skills Cloud into Skills Cloud skills. Workday doesn't convert tenanted translations of duplicate skills in languages not supported by Skills Cloud, but we continue to display the translated skill to users.
Example: When an English maintained skill that has a Spanish tenanted translation converts to a Skills Cloud skill, Workday removes this skill from the Maintain Skills report. However, users with Spanish as their preferred language continue to see that skill in Spanish, as previously configured.
This background process affects skills used on all skill-enabled Workday objects.
Synonymous Skill Management
Synonym Skill Management enables a series of background jobs that regularly evaluate all skills in your tenant for any that are a synonym of a Skills Cloud skill. If a match is found, Workday automatically:
- Creates the canonical Skills Cloud skill in your tenant if it doesn't already exist.
- Migrates usages of the synonymous tenanted skill to the matching Skills Cloud skill.
- Keeps the highest entered skill level for the Skills Cloud skill.
- Deletes the tenanted skill.
The Synonym Skill Management background process runs every hour and identifies skills in your tenant that are synonymous with a Skills Cloud skill. Workday removes these skills from your tenant and replaces them with the synonymous Skills Cloud skill. This conversion affects all crowdsourced, maintained, and Skills Cloud skills in your tenant except for those skills used by candidates.
This background process affects skills used on all skill-enabled Workday objects.
You can exclude individual skills from being converted by editing the skill on the
Maintain Skills
report and selecting the Exclude from Synonym Management
check box. When first enabling Skills Cloud, Workday will automatically exclude all maintained skills from synonym management by default. Workday recommends using the Put Skills web service to change this option for maintained skills in bulk.Deprecated Skill Management
Skills Cloud skills can be marked as Deprecated and removed from the Skills Cloud. Workday deprecates skills when they no longer meet Workday's definition of a skill, including checks for labor market relevance, ambiguity, and relevance for professional development. When Skills Cloud deprecates a Skills Cloud skill in use in a customer tenant, Workday:
- Creates an inactive maintained skill with the same name as the deprecated skill.
- Moves over the usages from the deprecated skill to the newly created inactive maintained skill.
- Keeps the highest entered skill level for the Skills Cloud skill.
- Removes the deprecated skill from the customer's tenant.
Workday creates inactive maintained skills to ensure that any customer usages against the deprecated skill are preserved. Workday won't delete customer usages of a skill on their behalf.
This background process replaces the deprecated skills in your tenant with inactive maintained skills. Workday automatically enables this background process when you enable the duplicate skills conversion background process.
Additional Information
A usage is a connection between a skill and another object in Workday. Examples of usages include:
- Skills in skill categories
- Skills on workers
- Skills on candidates
- Skills on job profiles
Additional notes to consider:
- You can't exclude crowdsourced skills. Workday automatically replaces crowdsourced skills if they're a duplicate or a synonym of a Skills Cloud skill,
- Workday doesn't change the skills on the candidate person type. When Workday finds a skill on a candidate that's a synonym of a Skills Cloud skill, Workday will create a crowdsourced skill to represent the candidate skill item. Workday migrates and replaces all other usages of the synonymous skill on every other object.
- When you've created a parent-child relationship between maintained skills by marking a maintained skill as a Duplicate Of another maintained skill, and the parent- maintained skill is a synonym of a Skills Cloud skill, Workday moves usages from the parent maintained skill to the Skills Cloud skill. Workday then deletes the parent-maintained skill and leaves the child as an inactive maintained skill.