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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2025-09-19
Reference: Skills Terminology

Reference: Skills Terminology

Terms
Descriptions
Canonical skills
Skills Cloud skills.
Critical skills
You can group and classify skills that you consider critical to specific contexts, such as job profiles and supervisory organizations. You can then create custom reports to identify workers and candidates with these critical skills.
Critical skills can include:
  • Skills Cloud skills
  • Maintained skills
Crowdsourced skills
There are 3 types of skills:
  • Skills Cloud skills
  • Maintained skills
  • Crowdsourced skills
Crowdsourced skills, also called unrecognized skills, are added by workers.
Example: The Marketing team starts using a new video production software called ShadowBox. Workers update their profiles to list ShadowBox as one of their skills and it becomes a Skills Cloud skill. Workday Skills Cloud then manages the crowdsourced skill by automatically merging duplicates and synonyms with the Skills Cloud skill.
Workday doesn’t include crowdsourced skills in search results or faceted reports.
Deprecated skills
Skills Cloud automatically deprecates skills when they no longer meet Workday’s standards in terms of labor market relevance and professional development usage.
When Skills Cloud deprecates a skill, Workday:
  • Creates an inactive maintained skill with the same name as the deprecated skill.
  • Transfers usage data in your tenant from the deprecated skill to the new maintained skill.
  • Removes the deprecated skill from your tenant.
Duplicate skills
Duplicate skills are:
  • Multiple identical entries of a maintained or crowdsourced skill.
  • Maintained or crowdsourced skills that are exact matches to a Skills Cloud skill.
Workday Skills Cloud uses machine learning to automatically merge duplicate and synonymous skills, reducing redundancies.
External skills
Skills that you import into Workday from a third-party system, enabling you to consolidate your skills data into 1 place and create a cohesive skills experience for your workers.
Maintained skills
There are 3 types of skills:
  • Skills Cloud skills
  • Maintained skills
  • Crowdsourced skills
Maintained skills, also called tenanted skills, are skills specific to your organization that you define in Workday. Administrators can add, edit, and remove maintained skills using the
Maintain Skills
 report.
Example: Your organization uses a proprietary programming language called Yukon to build software, so you add the skill Yukon Proficiency to the
Maintain Skills
 report.
Required skills
You can label some skills required for job profiles and job requisitions.
Example: You create a job requisition for a Project Manager. You specify that Time Management is a required skill but Outlook isn't, because you know Outlook can easily be taught to the right candidate.
Skill categories and category groups
You can group multiple skills by categories and category groups using the:
  • Maintain Skill Categories
     report.
  • Maintain Skill Category Groups
     task.
Example: You create 2 skill categories called Sales and Production. In each category, you add skills relevant to that department, such as:
Sales:
  • Customer Relations
  • Networking
  • Social Media
Production:
  • Blueprints
  • Certifications to operate heavy machinery
  • Safety awareness
You can now use skill categories to more quickly create job profiles.
Skill endorsements and ratings
Skill endorsements are when others endorse a worker's skills. When workers give feedback, they can select up to 100 skills to endorse for the feedback recipient. Workday Skills Cloud uses machine learning to suggest skill endorsements based on the skills included in the recipient’s profile and the feedback request.
Skill ratings are numbers, between 1 and 5, assigned to each skill to represent proficiency. Workers can give skill ratings:
  • To themselves, for example as part of an quarterly performance review.
  • To other workers when you configure anytime feedback templates to enable skill ratings.
Skill gaps
When workers’ current skills or skill levels fall short of those listed on their job profiles or don't align with the business needs of the organization.
When you perform a skill gap analysis, you assess workers’ skills to identify opportunities for training, restructuring, or talent recruiting.
Skill levels
The proficiency level that Workday Skills Cloud calculates for each skill, based on the skill’s sources and the weightings that you configure for each source type on the
Maintain Skill Level Setup
 task.
There are 5 customizable skill levels:
  1. Beginner
  2. Intermediate
  3. Experienced
  4. Advanced
  5. Expert
Note: You must enable skill ratings for Workday to calculate skill levels.
Example use cases for skill levels:
  • You want to hire an Assistant Manager. On the job profile, you specify that the position requires level 3 leadership skills.
  • A year after you hire the Assistant Manager, they apply for a promotion because they've grown their leadership skills to a level 4, making them eligible for a promotion to Manager.
Skill profiles
Enable you to organize qualifications for jobs and career paths.
You can build skill profiles based on:
  • Certifications.
  • Competencies.
  • Education.
  • Languages.
  • Responsibilities.
  • Skills.
  • Training.
  • Work Experience.
You can use skill profiles to:
  • Build job profiles and job requisitions.
  • Search for candidates and workers by the qualifications in a skill profile when you click
    Find Workers
     on the
    View Skill Profile
     report.
Skill sources
Sources are a type of skill validation. They demonstrate the worker’s proficiency with a skill and can include any relevant data from the worker's profile, such as certifications and work history.
You can click any skill on a worker’s profile to see its sources.
Example: When you click a worker's People Management skill, Workday opens a modal listing any people manager positions included in their work history.
Skills
An ability or application of knowledge that is needed for work. Skills are learned with practice and skill proficiency can change over time.
You can add Workday skills to:
  • Candidate profiles.
  • Gigs.
  • Job profiles.
  • Job requisitions.
  • Learning courses.
  • Worker profiles.
Example: An IT engineer can add skills like these to their worker profile:
  • JavaScript
  • Project management
  • Data encryption
  • Cybersecurity
Then they can work on developing certain skills to match their career goals.
Skills Cloud
Workday’s AI-powered tool that helps you manage skills by:
  • Automatically resolving duplicate and synonymous skills.
  • Suggesting relevant skills when you add or endorse skills on job profiles, job requisitions, and worker and candidate profiles.
  • Providing a database of approximately 60 thousand general skills for your workers to choose from, informed by public data sets, purchased data sets, and cross-industry customer data.
Skills Cloud skills
There are 3 types of skills:
  • Skills Cloud skills
  • Maintained skills
  • Crowdsourced skills
Skills cloud skills are general, tenant-nonspecific skills maintained by Workday’s AI-powered Skill Cloud database, such as:
  • Leadership
  • Search engine optimization (SEO)
  • Time management
  • Word processing
Skills ontology
The structure of an organization’s skills database including skill hierarchies and the relationships between jobs, skills, and workers.
Example: An ontology might categorize the skill Recruiting under the larger Human Capital Management category, and specify that you can find the skill on certain job and worker profiles.
When you import external skill data into Workday, you map your existing skills onto Workday’s skill ontology. The Workday Skills Cloud ontology uses machine learning to continuously update itself, adapting in real time to changes both within your organization and across the labor market.
Suggested skills
You can enable Skills Cloud to use machine learning to suggest relevant skills for:
  • Job profiles.
  • Job requisitions.
  • Worker and candidate profiles.
To view suggested skills for job profiles access the
Suggested Skills for Job Profiles
 report, which suggests skills based on:
  • Text data in the job profile.
  • Text data (including required and optional skills) from the 10 most recently edited job requisitions under that job profile.
Workday suggests up to 10 skills from each data source and updates suggestions hourly.
Synonymous skills
Synonymous skills are:
  • Multiple entries of a maintained or crowdsourced skill that are synonymous, but not exact matches.
  • Maintained or crowdsourced skills that are exact matches to Skills Cloud skill synonyms.
Example: Skills Cloud may classify these as synonymous skills:
  • HR
  • Human Resources
  • Human Capital Management
  • Employee Management
  • People Resource Center
If Human Resources is the canonical Skills Cloud skill, then Skills Cloud automatically merges all usages of the synonymous skills under the single Human Resources skill, reducing redundancies.
Tenanted skills
Maintained skills.