Totara Learn Open Discussions

Adding skills to user profiles

 
Marina Zelinskaya
Adding skills to user profiles
by Marina Zelinskaya - Thursday, 15 March 2018, 9:34 AM
 

Hi,

Our company is looking for a solution that would allow us to add skills list (such as PHP, SQL, .Net, Photoshop, grand writing, etc) for individual users.  Ideally we would like to be able to see the skills for each user (such as it being a part of user profile) and also to be able to search for users based on a specific skill need.

I am wondering if there are others out there who have been able to implement this solution, and how you went about it.  

Thank you,


Marina Z.

me
Re: Adding skills to user profiles
by George Angus - Thursday, 15 March 2018, 7:59 PM
Group Totara

Hi Marina,

Have you considered using our Open Badges functionality?

There's an associated report source.

 'Badges are able to be awarded by Totara Learn for the achievement of defined skills at a course and site levels. Badges are able to be displayed publicly displaying the details of the criteria and evidence they were awarded for as well as the organisation who awarded the badge. Badges are also able to be collected across a number of issuers and stored in an external backpack.

There are two categories of badges:

Site badges: Available to users site wide and related to the site wide activities, like finishing a set of courses.

Course badges: Available to users enrolled in the course and related to the activities that happen inside of this course.

The main differences between badge types are the available criteria and the location within the navigation menus.

Enabling Badges

Badges functionality can be completely disabled or enabled in Advanced features under Site administration. This feature is enabled by default. If you completely disable the badges feature after having issued some badges to site users, such badges will still be successfully verified by external backpacks.'

Theres some further info here: https://openbadges.org/get-started/

Hope this is useful,

cheers,

George.

Marina Zelinskaya
Re: Adding skills to user profiles
by Marina Zelinskaya - Friday, 16 March 2018, 7:35 AM
 

Hello, George,

Thank you for that.

I did actually look into badges as an option, and while it does offer some useful functionality, one of the reason that it's not an optimal option for us is the limit of fields.  We would like to have some additional descriptive field which could serve as search criteria in the report.  I was wondering if there's a possibility of adding a function to badges to create custom fields?


Thank you,

Marina Z.

Ian MacKinnon
Re: Adding skills to user profiles
by Ian MacKinnon - Friday, 16 March 2018, 8:21 AM
 

Hi Marina,

Competencies could be an option for your requirement. They won't appear on the profile page of the user but you can report on who is proficient in a certain skill/competency and at what level. You can create types and custom fields to add extra information to each competency and with a custom scale you can assess their proficiency more accurately.


Ian

Marina Zelinskaya
Re: Adding skills to user profiles
by Marina Zelinskaya - Friday, 16 March 2018, 9:12 AM
 

Thank you, Ian.

Is there a way to assign competencies directly to users?  I only saw a way to assign them through courses, but for our need we need to have skills/competencies that employees already have, and even the ones that they didn't necessary went to school for, such as secondary language for someone who was born/came from another country.

Thank you,

Marina Z.