About skills

Applies To: Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3, Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2, Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Feature Pack, Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012

You can track the skills that workers, applicants, or contact persons have or should have. You can also specify the skills that are required for a specific job.

For example, you might track the following skills:

• Supervisory – Ability to supervise the work of others.

• Leadership – Ability to lead employees and business domains.

• Planning – Ability to look ahead, to form visions, and to see them through.

• HTML – Ability to write HTML code.

Before you can assign a skill to a person or a job, create a skill mapping search, or create a skill profile, you must enter information about the skills in the Skills form. For more information, see Skills (form). For each skill, you can select a skill type and a rating model. Rating models help evaluate a person's actual level of skill, the level they should work to achieve, or the level of skill that is required for a job. For more information, see Create a rating model.

Specify job skills

When you enter information about a job, you can specify the skills that a person must have before they can work in the job. For more information, see Key tasks: Jobs.

Enter skills for workers, applicants, or contacts

You can enter target skills or actual skills for workers, applicants, or contacts. A target skill is a skill that a person plans to achieve. An actual skill is a skill that a person currently has.

For more information, see Competency - Skills (form).

Skill mapping searches

You can create a skill mapping search to find a worker, applicant, or contact person who is qualified to perform a specific type of task, participate in a work group, or occupy a specific position. You can also save skill mapping searches as a skill profile to save for later.

Skill gap analysis and skill profile analysis

You can create a skill profile analysis to view a list of the competencies for a worker, applicant, or contact person as of a specific date. You can create a skill gap analysis to compare a person’s skills and the skills that are required for a specific job.

A skill profile analysis and a skill gap analysis also provide a graphical representation of one skill profile or the comparison of two skill profiles. This graphical representation is referred to as the skill wheel.

Each skill is displayed as a segment of the skill wheel. Only 12 segments are displayed at the same time. If a profile contains more than 12 skills, click the up or down arrow keys to the right side of the wheel to change the skills that are displayed in the wheel. When you do this, new skills are added to the wheel and previously viewed skills disappear.

The colors shown in the wheel are indicated by the legend to the right of the wheel. To show or hide the legend, select or clear the Show legend check box.

• Skill gap analysis – Target levels are always the darker color. The actual level is superimposed on the target level as a lighter, semitransparent shade of the same color so that you can see the actual skill level relative to the target skill level.

• Skill profile analysis – The target level for all skills is represented by the outermost ring on the skill wheel. If a person has the targeted skill level as their actual skill level, each ring in the segment will be filled in with color.

The number of rings inside the wheel corresponds to the number of skill levels that are assigned to the skills in the profile. Click a segment in the wheel to change the skill selected in the table in the lower part of the form.

For more information, see Create a skill gap analysis or a skill profile analysis.