Ranking Skill Levels

[Lisa_Gervais]

I found the Talent Database in the templates and wonder if there is a way to add another level of ranking to the skills?

What I would like to be able to do is get a type of inventory of employee skill levels. For example, someone may rank themselves a 3 (aka advanced) in visual design, where another might be a 2 (aka intermediate)

I created a seperate base with the skills by category and department on their own but can’t seem to pull the two together?

[JonathanBowen]

Hi @Lisa_Gervais - One way to do this is to have the People and Skills as separate tables, then bring the people/skills/rank together into a 3rd table (a “junction” table):

Then, if you want to find all of the visual designers with rank of 4 or 5 for example, you can filter on this table.

Hope this helps

JB

[Lisa_Gervais]

Thanks Jonathan I’m beginning to pull something together that seems to work!

[Lisa_Gervais]

Hi Jonathan, As you may have guessed I’m pretty new to Airtable so apologies in advance!

I’ve created two tables as you suggested above.

Employee Info table that collects their name, job title and Discipline (aka Department).
Skills table that lists all of the skills relevant to our company and sorts them by category (aka Market) and Discipline.

How can I create one form using fields from both of those tables to send to each person asking them to rank their skill level for each?

I’d be happy to send you what I’ve created so far if it would help. Not sure how to do so here.

[JonathanBowen]

Hi @Lisa_Gervais - I think you’re on the right lines. You need to create the 3rd “junction table” that links people and skills. In my example:

this consists of a link field related to the People table (Person field), a link field related to the Skills table (Skill field) and a Rating field (a single select field with values such as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Now, if you create a form on this junction table:

you will get this (when you open the form):

Now, you can share the form and your team can pick the person, the skill and the rating, submitting the form once for each of their skills. The only downside of this is that all the people are visible in the Person selector on the form. This might be OK, but might be less than ideal, depending upon your particular scenario.

Does this give you what you need?

JB

[Lisa_Gervais]

Hi Jonathan, thanks for this. Is there a way to send all the skills in one form to one person? To make things even more complicated. Each skill and person belongs to a Discipline so only those skills should be sent to them. For example if I’m in the Architect discipline then I should only see those skills that are also in the Architect discipline.

[JonathanBowen]

Hi Lisa

Lisa_Gervais:

Is there a way to send all the skills in one form to one person?

Yes, there is, although there are some knock-on effects you might not like. You can prefill the form with the person by tacking this onto the end of the form URL:

?prefill_[YOUR FIELD NAME]=[Person ID]

so, an example might be:

?prefill_Person=Jim

However, what this gets you is this:

As you can see, the name is pre-filled, as you would expect, but there’s nothing to stop you deleting the pre-filled value and then choosing from the full list again.

What I would recommend for this is to use a 3rd party form app - e.g. Jotform or Typeform. In this way, you can prefill the form with a person ID (would generally recommend something like email address or some random ID such as the Airtable record ID), but you can’t delete this and enter or view something else.

Lisa_Gervais:

Each skill and person belongs to a Discipline so only those skills should be sent to them.

OK, this is a bit more tricky. There is a way to do linked records - see this post:

Conditional Logic-ish Linked Records Show and tell

TL;DR version: Airtable’s recently added capability to limit linked-record selection to a specific view allows users to incorporate, to a degree, conditional logic. The specifics: ‘Conditional logic’ can mean a lot of things: Any use of an IF() or SWITCH() statement is a form of conditional logic. Here, I’m using it in what’s become an increasingly common manner: to mean the limiting of available options based on an earlier choice. For example, take a look at the following diagram. [Condition…

A simpler alternative to this is just to make your skill selection box show the discipline and the skill. There’s no filtering, but it is (somewhat) clear to the user what they should be choosing from. To do this, you could add another table for Disciplines and link this to the skills (and people) table:

The ID is a combo of the two things. Now in your form on the skill selection field you get this:

It’s a workaround for sure, but if you don’t have too many disciplines or skills it might be OK for you.

JB

[JonathanBowen]

Should have said, if you go for something like Jotform or Typeform, both have a direct integration with Airtable or you can use a 3rd party integration app like Zapier