As a workforce management solution, ShiftPlanning gives managers the tools they need to add, edit, and organize staff. One key organizational tool in ShiftPlanning is the 'skills' feature. Skills serve as filters within our employee scheduling application and are quite flexible in definition. Managers can add skills under "Manage Skills" in the tab staff. (Staff are assigned via "fast assignment)
Below you'll find 5 ways that ShiftPlanning users are making the best use of 'skills':
1. Skills as 'Skills' & Certifications
As a scheduler, it is likely that your shifts may require a very specific skillset at times. In ShiftPlanning, it's simple to identify available staff who meet one or multiple criteria. Skills can allow you to specify employee qualities such as: Spanish Fluent, Excel Expert, or Project Management
Along the same lines as above, skills can be added to specify certain employee certifications and/or course and training completion such as: CPR, PMP, or even in-house training (i.e, "intro to company")
2. Skills as Positions
In ShiftPlanning, Locations represent the highest level of organization with skills as a tertiary level. The most common structure in our system is for positions to be analagous to actual positions such as chef, dishwasher, and waiter and for location to represent an actual location such as "Main St." However, some organization need extra level of organizations. For example where location would remain "Main St", Positions = depts, and skills take the place of positions.
3. Skills as Seniority
In some scheduling situaions, it is important to give scheduling preference to more senior staff. Skills can help schedulers manage this task with titles such as: Level 1, Level 2, etc
Another example of skills being used for seniority (and as a position as well) would be where there are different levels within a position. For example, within a "customer service" position there may exist: 'associate', 'manager', and 'team lead'
4. Skills as Employment Type
In ShiftPlanning, skills serve as a filter within reports, including payroll specific reports. Often times, finance staff will need to segment staff into different payroll-related types. Skills can be used to tackle this need with titles such as: Salary & Hourly, Full-Time & Part-Time, or Employee & contractor
5. Skills as 'Tasks'
Skills can be used as part of task management as well. Want to get a view of the schedules of your store 'closers'? What about looks at the clock-in times of your 'openers'? These are just some of the ways skills can be helpful as tasks.
Is your organization making use of skills? If so, how? Do you have any suggestions for how we make skills more useful in the application? If so, please let us know at info@shiftplanning.com.
Happy Scheduling!
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