Matching co-workers based on expertise / growth areas

[Dante_Guintu]

Hi AT community. Looking for some advice and tips (btw, I’m new to Airtable).

We’re creating an informal buddy/mentor matching program within our team. Our table is fairly straightforward and folks filled out a form:

[record]

• Name
• areas of strength/expertise [open text]
• areas of growth [open text]
• paired for strength [hidden]
• paired for growth [hidden]

The last two are to keep track of who’s paired up with whom.

The ask: how can AT be leveraged to create matches between a listed strength/expertise with someone looking to grow in that subject.

A few caveats, we don’t expect an automated pairing as other nuances will come into play (like time zones) but just something semi-automated that helps synthesize the blobs of input. Hope that makes sense.

Many thanks.

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hi Dante, I’ve put something together here that would be how I would handle it

(It assumes that the records are created via a Form submission, and that users are keying in the data in a comma separated list)

The idea is that, after users have submitted the form with the comma separated list of areas of strength and growth (e.g. Strengths = “Expertise 1, Expertise 2”, Growth = “Expertise 3”), we use an automation to paste those values into a linked field to a table called Areas, resulting in something that looks like this:

From here, you can tell that Expertise 1 is a strength for Person 1, Person 5 and Person 6, and that an area of growth for Person 2, Person 3, and Person 4

We then have a lookup field back in the original table that will list the people whose strengths match the areas of growth for that record

To view the setup (formulas, automations etc), you can duplicate the base by clicking the title of the base at the top of the screen, then the three horizontal dots on the right, and then the “Duplicate Base” button

Happy to answer any questions!

[Dante_Guintu]

:star_struck: Hi @Adam_TheTimeSavingCo .
Thanks so much for your input and suggestions — these are so amazing and on point. Yes, the Expertise and Growth columns are comma separated text. Super appreciative of this solution as I would stum-bumble around. I’ll experiment and post findings here.

Cheers and have a great weekend!
=D.