Team member competency tracking in Confluence - labels for table rows?

[Zoltán Lehóczky]

I'd like to track competencies of team members in Confluence.

Mainly this would mean that I'd like to have entries (in some form) for the team members where one can add competency labels for them, much like tagging (or even page labels in Confluence) works: I want to be able to search and filter on these labels and the labels should be re-usable (e.g. two team members knowing JavaScript should have the same "JavaScript" label).

How would you do this? The trivial approach would be to add every team member as a page where labels would be their competencies. This looks a bit heavy-handed and also I'd like to be able to see a list with all team members and their competencies (to have an overview, not to have to open their page individually, see: https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/21633256).

Note that I'm using Confluence Cloud.

Thanks in advance!

[Milo Test · Accepted solution]

We do this. And yes, we have a separate Bio for every engineer and they are all labeled accordingly.

Separate Bios gives us:

• Lists of engineers using the Content by Label macro
• An interactive list using the Labels List macro where we can select a skill to get a list of engineers, then keep selecting skills to narrow the list down
• A heatmap of skill labels using the Popular Labels macro
• An autocompleting search field using the Livesearch macro
• Tables of engineers with their basic information

The last one requires the Page properties macro on each Bio then the Page properties report macro on a summary page.

We label the Bios with: the primary and secondary general ability (e.g. networking, storage, etc.); the specific skills (e.g. cisco, wireless, emc, sql, etc.); and the area of the country they cover (so we can create lists by region). Some engineers have a dozen labels.

Yes, this took a bit of work, but it was mostly a one-time deal. And yes, all this works on Cloud.

Oh, and management loves it!

[Zoltán Lehóczky]

This is freaking brilliant, thank you!

[Stanislav Vincent]

awesome! great solution. Thanks

[Ryan]

You say your bios include general abilities and specific skills. How do you manipulate the labels to designate which is which? 

[Zoltán Lehóczky]

We don't distinguish between the two really, it's just all labels. We do have a few prefixed labels, like roles (e.g. software engineer, office manager) are prefixed with "role-".

[Ryan]

I suspected there might be a prefix involved. Thanks!

[Milo Grika]

We actually don't distinguish between primary and secondary skills in searching, they'll see it when they open the actual bio.

We do have a prefix for certifications though: cert-. That way, we can show a list of who has which certifications separate from the matrix of skills; some of which can have the same name, e.g. cisco.

As an update, I've since added all the project managers and sales folk since the HR software was difficult to update their locations.

[Pronto Software]

This is a great solution with flexibility for additional dimensions by adding label sets. Well done, great idea.

Cheers,

Peter Quick

[Garrett Chan]

Could you provide an example page what this would look like?

[Milo Test]

Finally got around to providing examples. (Redacting is a bitch, and I still probably missed something.)

Bio — The actual bio of the person; we send these to potential customers so they know who'll be working on the project

Competency — This is the "dashboard" that gives PMs, Sales, etc. the ability to find the personnel

Competency Guide — This is another way to browse personnel; requires the Page properties and Page properties report macros

Bio Edit — Things to note here:

• General info is in a Page properties macro and is used to buildout the Competency Guide

• The Notable Projects Div protects this info from copy and pasting, exporting to Word and exporting to PDF as it lists customers. Obviously the user could do a screen capture, but it keeps the honest people honest. Also note that the Div macro only works in the classic layout.

[Milo Test]

[Annabell]

Hi there,

if you want to use labels for skills, thereby being able to make use of the Labels List macro and others related to labels, I'd like to hint you to this new free app called Pagela - Page Labeler: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1223503/ (disclaimer: I developed it).

It encourages usage of curated labels as skills thereby

• preventing different spellings of labels used to build up the list of skills
• allows people to easily select from this list of skills to add it to their page

Hope this helps anyone to implement a skills database as hinted by Milo.