AI Assisted Skills Architecture Creation

[SharathSundar]

Introduction:

In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, skills have become the new currency for organizations seeking to attract, nurture, grow, and retain top talent. A skills-based approach leads to improved agility, better talent development, and more efficient resource allocation. 

Organizations around the world are increasingly looking to move towards becoming a skills-based organization, but often have questions about how they can  

• Surface skills: Many organizations lack a systematic way to identify and capture employee skills from various sources like Job Profiles, Job Requisitions etc 
• Maintain skills: Keeping employee skills data up-to-date can be challenging, especially with frequent changes in technology and employee roles. 
• Integrate skill data: Integrating skills data with other HR systems like learning management systems and talent management platforms can be complex. 

SAP Successfactors is pleased to announce the release of the AI-Assisted Skills Architecture Creation Premium AI feature, which enables customers to easily  

• Create a Skills Library: Leverage AI to automatically identify skills from job profile descriptions within your organization's data 
• Map Skills to Job Roles: Provide employees with a clear view of the expected skills for their job roles 

Start collecting Skills Data: Automatically populate skills to workers’ Growth Portfolios based on their job roles. Note: This feature requires an Al Units license (Please contact your account team for complete details). Though you can test the feature in preview environments at no charge to evaluate its capabilities before enabling it in production, the license must be in place for the feature to become available. Only Production usage will be charged. 

Demo link: 

Customers should be part of TIH Workzone group and can access the demo from here: https://workzone-core.one.int.sap/groups/pVpjyQ4TGqIzMbHs7Ydlb8/documents/Ru7gozA77PlBLFz2xKwaam

SAP internal demo link: FinalVideo_AIAssistedSkillsArchitectureCreation.mov

Further in this post we will go over the Admin journey detailing the steps to be taken post each level completion in this process (Refer image)  

Prerequisites and Preparation

With AI Assisted Skills Architecture Creation, we support only customers who have Job Profile Builder enabled and upgraded to Talent Intelligence Hub.   

Current Prerequisites: 

• Job Profile Builder enabled  
• Upgraded to Talent Intelligence Hub. 

Exclusions:  

• Customers who have Job Profile Builder, but also have legacy Job Profile Builder skills functionality enabled 

FAQ 1: When will the feature support SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting customers?  

We support this feature for customers who use Recruiting along with Job Profile Builder. This is available from August 2024.

FAQ 2: If customers have Recruiting but no Job Profile Builder, will this feature be supported ?

If customers have Recruiting but no Job Profile Builder, the AI-Assisted Skills Architecture Creation feature will not be supported. This feature is specifically designed to work in conjunction with Job Profile Builder, allowing for a comprehensive experience by populating extracted skills into roles and aligning with the skills information already visible in Growth Portfolio.

Languages

The AI-Assisted Skills Architecture Creation process sends the Job Profile Builder description data, along with its locale information, to our AI systems. We support the AI process for the following languages: 

Language	Country	SF Locale
English	United States	en_US
English	United Kingdom	en_GB
French	France	fr_FR
French	Canada	fr_CA
German	Germany	de_DE
German	Switzerland	de_CH
Dutch	NETHERLANDS	nl_NL
Dutch	Dutch (Standard)	nl
Spanish	Spain	es_ES
Spanish	MEXICO	es_MX
Italian	Italy	it_IT

Language Handling in the AI-Assisted Skills Architecture Creation Process

Our process will first look for job profile data maintained in the English US locale (en_US). If present, we will send it to our AI system, otherwise we will check if English GB locale information (en_GB) is available, otherwise we will check for French (fr_FR), and so on. 

If the job profile data’s locale information stored in SuccessFactors matches with any of the supported languages, skills will be extracted. Only when the locale does not match any of the supported languages, and no skills data will be extracted from that profile. 

FAQ 3: Why are other languages not supported ? 

If the upgrade is performed on data in any of the languages listed above, the system will  provide translated values for the following languages:  

• Portuguese 
•  Polish 
• Swedish 
• Norwegian 
• Danish 
• Finnish 
• Japanese 
• Hebrew 
• Czech 
• Slovak 
• Croatian 
• Slovenian 
• Greek
• Turkish 
• Romanian 
• Hungarian 
• Russian 
• Chinese (simplified and traditional).

The Job Profile Builder Skills Extraction Process

This is how we will create a skills architecture from your Job Profile Builder data. First, the AI will look at all long and short description fields in your active job profile descriptions. All description fields for one active profile are considered one object for the purpose of charging AI units for the use of the feature. 

We don’t use the following job profiles for this process 

• Any profile in draft Mode 
• Any profile in Inactive status 
• Any profile which is Position based.  

If Recruiting is enabled along with Job Profile Builder: 

In addition to the skills extraction from job profiles, the AI-Assisted Skills Architecture Creation extracts skills from the three most recently approved job requisitions for a job role from the past two years. The skills are extracted from the descriptions of job requisitions. The extracted skills are mapped to the job role associated with the job requisitions and also added to the Attributes Library in Talent Intelligence Hub.

 FAQ 4: Why don’t you include Position-based profiles in the skills extraction process?  

Because a job role in Job Profile Builder can be associated with multiple position-based profiles, the Role to Skill mapping based on position profiles could potentially contain a very large number of skills, as required skills can vary between positions. 

Best Practices:

We strongly recommend that customers: 

• Copy Production job role data to Preview before testing the process 
• Use the ‘Import and Export Data’ tool to export all the ‘Role-Mapped Skills’ object data. This is to keep a backup of any current role to skill mapping information 
• Optional: If you are using the feature in production after testing, disable Growth Portfolio until the entire process is reviewed and changes are approved by the Admin. 

Upgrade Center Journey:

Feature Visibility

If your organization meets the prerequisites mentioned above, and your organization has licensed AI units, you will be able to see the option to upgrade to “AI Assisted Skills Architecture Creation” in the Upgrade Center.  

Note: Please contact your account team for information on purchasing AI units.

Content:

To verify whether the upgrade job is completed, please go to Scheduled job manager and check the Talent Intelligence Hub SkillsExtractionJob.  

Note: If the upgrade fails the first time, please retry it after few minutes, say 30 min or so. If it then succeeds, you should be good to go to next steps. If it fails again, please raise a support ticket. 

Customer Journey post Upgrade - Review process: 

After you have upgraded, Admins have the option to review the updates in the Attributes Library in Talent Intelligence Hub and Role to Skill mapping in Job Profile Builder. 

Talent Intelligence Hub Skills in Attributes Library: 

• Skills extracted are added to the Attribute Library with an Active status. Internally, the system adds another piece of metadata to mark them as Inferred. 
• If you find certain inferred skills inappropriate for your organization’s library, you may mark such skills Inactive.  
• You may use the UI screen to directly make some amendments or use the export option (Talent Intelligence Hub Attribute export) and choose to make some of the skills as Inactive and keep remaining as Active. Import the changes back. 

FAQ 5: What is the advantage of marking the extracted skills as Inferred skills ? 

Inferred skills are not shown on the Attribute selection list in other modules like Performance Management, Career Development Planning etc.  

FAQ 6: Will making skills Inactive in Talent Intelligence Hub Attributes Library also remove skills from Job Profile Builder Role to Skill mappings?  

It would be necessary to remove mappings in Job Profile Builder. If you mark certain skills Inactive in Talent Intelligence Hub, please ensure to remove these skills from Job Profile Builder mapping as well. 

Skill-Competency Duplication in Attributes Library: 

This upgrade is only possible after you’ve already upgraded to Talent Intelligence Hub, so you most likely have competencies in the Attributes Library. What if the Skills Architecture creation process finds skills that have duplicates in the competency attribute type? 

Let’s look at an example: you might already have a competency with the name "JAVA Programming Language" with the Attribute Type "Competency" in Talent Intelligence Hub.  

With Skills extracted through our Skills Architecture Creator process, there is a likelihood of the skill coming in with the same name "JAVA Programming Language". In this case, we also allow saving "JAVA Programming Language" with the Attribute Type "Skill".  

In the system, you will now have "JAVA Programming Language" as a competency and also “JAVA Programming Language" as a Skill. 

To move towards a Skills based organisation, we recommend that you have the skill without any conflicts in the competency library. In this case, mark the "JAVA Programming Language" with the Attribute Type "Competency" as INACTIVE after carefully assessing the downstream and overall impact in your SAP SuccessFactors instance. 

Role to Skill Mapping in Job Profile Builder: 

In Job Profile Builder, we have the job role mapped to the skills extracted as part of this process, readily available once the upgrade is successful. You can use the ‘Import and Export Data’ option to export the ‘Role-Mapped Skills’ object to view the role to skill mapping information. Currently, this export provides the following fields 

[OPERATOR]

externalCode

roleSkillMappings.status

roleSkillMappings.externalCode

roleSkillMappings.subModule

roleSkillMappings.wsmId

roleSkillMappings.wsmProficiencyLevel

This export does not provide the skill name. Only the skill id is included in roleSkillMappings.wsmId. For better readability, you have the option to use the Integration Center export of the Attribute file in the Talent Intelligence Hub to identify the corresponding skill name for the skill id. 

You can choose to make amendments to this role to skill mapping and reimport the file back with the required data. For data consistency, ensure that the skill which was made Inactive in Talent Intelligence Hub is also removed from the roleSkillMappings.wsmId. 

Role to Profile Mapping will be updated with ‘Inferred’ Skills 

If the job profile template includes a Skill section: 

• Once Role to Skill mapping is added, the same is also updated in Role based Job Profile. 
• While the skills can be seen on the Job Profile, it is not visible in Attribute selection tool until it is Confirmed in Attributes Library. 

If the job profile template does not include a Skill section: 

• If there is no skill section or it is removed from the Template prior to using AI-Assisted Skills Architecture Creation, skills are not shown on the Job Profile. 
• After the Admin reviews the skills, they can decide to enable the Skills section, which will also then show up in the job profile. 

Post Review Process: 

Set Inferred Skills to Confirmed: 

Once the Admin review is completed, you can run a scheduler job ‘Update Inferred Skills to Confirmed’ to change skills from inferred to confirmed. Once they are marked confirmed, they will be available for use in the same way as a skill created directly in the Admin Tool can be used. 

FAQ 7: What is the advantage of converting Inferred skills to Confirmed skills? 

Inferred skills are not shown on the Attribute selection list used to add skills in processes such as Performance Management, Career Development Planning, or Recruiting. Once the skills are confirmed, they will be visible and available for selection throughout SuccessFactors. 

Enable Growth Portfolio: 

From Manage Talent Intelligence Hub, you may now ‘Enable Growth Portfolio’. 

At this stage, all the active skills mapped to workers’ job profiles will be added to their Growth Portfolios without a rating. 

If you have added an expected proficiency rating to the role-skill mapping object then the expected rating for the skill will be displayed in the  Growth Portfolio.

Inferred Skills Will be Displayed in Two Cases 

For customers who have already enabled Growth Portfolio 

If you are a customer who has already enabled Growth Portfolio and would like to use the AI-Assisted Skills Architecture Creation process, please take note of the following: 

The extracted skills are populated in the Attributes Library marked as Inferred. They will not be shown in the attribute selection tool in processes throughout the suite. 

However, because of the Job Profile Builder role to skill mapping process, the Growth Portfolios will be populated with the appropriate skills, even if the skills are still in the inferred state. If you prefer not to use some of the inferred skills in your Attributes Library, you should set them to Inactive, which will also remove them from Growth Portfolios. 

Admin users can choose to run the ‘Update Inferred Skills to Confirmed’ job to Confirm the skills either now or later in their review process.  

Job Profile Acknowledgement in Job Profile Builder: 

Note: For those customers who have enabled the Job Profile Acknowledgment feature in Job Profile Builder, as soon as inferred skills are mapped to roles automatically via this upgrade process,  Job Profile Acknowledgement notifications will be sent.  

AI License Charges: 

2 AI units will be charged for each Job Profile object which is used for skills extraction on any Production instance. 

For more up to date information about AI charges, please reach out to your dedicated account team. They can provide you with current pricing details.

FAQ 8: Is there any dependency on Employee Central ? 

No, there is no dependency on Employee Central for this feature. It operates independently based on Job Profile Builder and is optionally supported if Recruiting is enabled along with Job Profile Builder.

FAQ 9: Will only Skill Names be created through this AI process? How about Skill Descriptions?

Yes, currently only Skill Names are created through the AI Assisted Skills Architecture Creation process. Skill Descriptions have to be manually added by the Administrator as per organizational needs.