Purpose

This article explains the purpose of the Upskilling feature and how you can use it to create development plan templates for guiding employees to upskill for their desired roles.

Audience

This article is intended for managers and talent admins with the Career Hub feature enabled in their Eightfold environment.

Overview

Eightfold's Upskilling feature is an essential investment for organizations seeking to future-proof their workforce. By providing robust upskilling opportunities, organizations equip employees with the necessary skills, leading to increased satisfaction and higher retention rates. This feature aligns upskilling programs with business objectives and offers valuable guidance, empowering employees to acquire the skills required for their desired roles effectively.

Managers or talent admins can sometimes find skills gaps in their company. They can use development plans to ensure that employees have the right skills to make the company's vision a success.

Creating a Template

A manager or a talent admin can create and manage Development Plan Templates that can be assigned to team members. They can create an impactful plan using courses from the marketplace, or adding specific tasks to be part of the plan, that can be later assigned to the relevant team members.

Note:

1. To create a template, you need to have this permission: perm_manage_upskilling_template
2. To be allowed to assign or unassign a template plan, the user must:
   1. Be able to edit the template, allowing them to assign it to anyone in the organization from this page.
   2. Or, if the user is a manager, they can view plans in the marketplace and assign them to their team members from there.

To create or manage a Development Plan Template, follow these steps:

1. Select the Development Plan Templates option from the My Activity dropdown available at the Career Hub home page.
2. You can create a new template by clicking Create template, or edit an existing one by selecting it from the list of templates.
3. Enter the below details on the Create development plan template page:
   1. Plan title (required)
   2. Target role
   3. Skills
   4. Duration

4. Click Courses from the Select a section to add tab to search for a relevant course and click Add to plan for adding it to the plan. You can always remove a selected course by clicking Remove from plan if it is no longer required.
   

   If you see any HTML content/tags displayed in the course description, navigate to career_hub_base_config > upskilling > enabled_entities > course > detail_view_layout > details > "data_key" in the Admin Console, and replace description with raw_description.

5. Click Tasks from the Select a section to add tab to add a custom instructions for the team member that they need to complete as part of this plan. Enter the Title and Description for the task in the Create a task window. You can also select the Skills covered, or add supporting files to the task, if required. Click Save once you are done. You can always remove a task by clicking Remove from plan if it is no longer required.
6. Click Publish once the plan is ready.

Once a plan is published, you can track the progress of the team members for every published development plan template.

Managing a Template

There are more editing options available for the plan before and after you publish, and these are described below:

• Collaborate: you can add team members for collaboration on a development plan, and they get edit access to the plan as well. Talent admins can typically use this to get more help from managers and functional experts in creating the plans.
• Assign: once you have a development plan ready, you can assign it to the relevant team members as per the team requirements, or the employee’s career interests.
• Unassign: once assigned, you can always unassign team members from the plan, either selecting a few at a time or many at once based on your requirements. This will erase their progress on the plan, as well as any other associated data.
• Notes: you can add notes to the development plan that can be simple remarks, or comments about the various aspects of the plan.
• You can also edit the template plan name, target role, skills, and plan duration, along with deleting the plan if required.

To know more about an employee’s view of a development plan, read Working with Development Plans.