Concept: Skills and Competencies Comparison

Skills describe what tool sets workers need to perform the job, while competencies describe how well workers perform the job. Skills are specific learned abilities. Examples:

Cloud Applications
Cloud Security
Python
Software as a Service (SaaS)

Competencies are proficiencies workers use to achieve role objectives. Examples:

Building Talent
Championing Innovation
Leadership
Results Orientation

You can use skills and competencies to track the capabilities that users acquire from various sources. Examples include education, certifications, and languages. Knowledge of these capabilities can help you to make smart decisions in growing your organization. Skills and competencies provide different levels of configurability and insight. Familiarize yourself with both features to learn how each can support your organization.

You can use skills or competencies, or both, depending on your use cases and objectives.

Skills and competencies provide different approaches to administrative control and worker development.

Approach	Skills	Competencies
Administrative Control	Provide a user-driven approach to understanding the capabilities of your workforce. When you enable Skills Cloud, you can organize your skills catalog with less administrative maintenance. Skills Cloud also contributes to machine learning products and solutions.	Provide a high degree of control defined by the organization, and relies on administrative configuration to maintain the catalog. Competencies contribute to selected machine learning solutions for suggested learning, connections, and mentors.
Worker Development	Skills support discovery and growth for your workers. Examples: How to bridge the skill gaps between an employee's current role and targeted future roles. Determining what resources might support the employee in building more skills. How to match the right people to the right job.	Competencies help improve evaluations, including reviews and retrospective conversations. Examples: How did your competency rating compare to your target? How do competency ratings impact overall performance ratings and compensation?

Skills and Competencies address different use cases and require different levels of maintenance.

	Skills	Competencies
Use Cases	You need to optimize your talent (such as building, buying, or redeploying talent) based on a wide variety of technical skills, knowledge, and capabilities. You need to build a broad and deep understanding of your workers' skill data, gaps, and trends. You need to help your workforce understand their skill gaps to help them increase their skills. You need to encourage a career development experience based on a wide variety of technical skills, knowledge, and capabilities.	You need to rate all employees at specific, defined levels or compensation grades on 8 leadership competencies defined by your organization. You need to rate targeted employees on 4 core values that you define for your organization. You need detailed control over all definitions and descriptions, including proficiency rating scales, to evaluate employees by specific bands. You need to conduct assessments of various worker populations to meet compliance requirements.
Maintenance	If you don't enable Skills Cloud, or if you have customer-specific skills (such as unique or proprietary skills), you must maintain the skills in your tenant. If you enable Skills Cloud, Workday continuously maintains and updates Skills Cloud skills.	You must maintain the competency catalog in your tenant. Workday supports Competencies business processes, so you can set effective dates for any changes.

You can use Skills and Competencies to address different methods for evaluating workers.

Function	Skills	Competencies
Assign to employees	Mark skills as critical for employees based on supervisory organization, job family, and job profile. You can also assign skills as being critical to all employees.	Assign competencies based on worker's compensation grade and management level.
Ratings	You can set ratings using skill levels. Skills support peer-to-peer rating, manager-to-direct-report rating, and self-rating. You can apply weights to different skill rating sources. You can add the Get Feedback step in employee review business processes to include skill ratings and surface ratings in employee reviews.	You can set targets by a worker's management level or compensation grade. Rating scales might vary by competency. Descriptions on ratings might vary based on compensation grade and management level. You can also change ratings over time and set effective dates for them.
Definitions	Skills don't support definitions. Skills Cloud skills are skills in Workday that are commonly understood in the market.	Competencies support definitions. You can change competency names and descriptions over time, and set effective dates for them.
Categorization and structure	You can set skill item categories and category groups to create an internal skills hierarchy. You can also mark skills as critical for a specific context. Examples: Job families, job profiles, or supervisory organizations.	You can set up competency classes and categories to organize a competency catalog.

You can use skills with or without enabling Skills Cloud. We recommend using Skills Cloud to take advantage of Workday's machine learning capabilities to:

Collect the data to help you understand the skills of your workforce.
Gain insight to plan for future organizational growth, including developing existing workers and hiring new ones.
Optimize your programs for adding new skills and increasing expertise in existing skills of your workers.

Skills Cloud provides additional features when you enable it.

Features without Skills Cloud	Features with Skills Cloud
Administrators maintain a list of skills that users can add to their profile. Workers and candidates can create crowdsourced skills that they can't find, and add them to their profile.	Increases the number of skills users can add to their profile. Returns related skills based on a person's search. Automatically performs regular background jobs that can reduce the number of skills to maintain. Prepares your tenant for machine learning solutions from Workday.

For more information, see Setup Considerations: Skills Cloud.