Building a culture of development starts with knowing where your team stands today and where you want them to be tomorrow. This guide walks through the full skills journey in Tellent, from setting up your foundation, to assessing your team, to spotting gaps, to acting on what you find through training and development. Each step links to a deeper article when you want more detail.

Three pieces work together to give you a meaningful picture of your team's skills: a skills library, positions, and skill mappings that connect the two.

Set up your skills library. Your skills library is the central catalog of every competency you want to track, like "Python programming," "Project management," or "Customer communication." Each skill sits in an area of expertise (a category like "Technical skills" or "Soft skills") and uses a proficiency scale that defines how it's measured. For the full setup, see Managing your skills library.

Create your positions. Positions describe the roles in your organization, for example "Junior backend developer," "Senior product designer," or "People manager." You can keep them flat or add seniority levels. Positions are what connect a skill to a person: an employee has a position, and the position is what tells Tellent which skills apply to them.

Build your skill mappings. A skill mapping is the framework that links positions to skills and sets the expected proficiency level for each one. You can create broad mappings (e.g. "Individual contributors," "People managers"), department-level mappings (e.g. "Engineering"), or position-specific ones, and an employee can have several mappings applied at once. Once a mapping is published, every employee in the matching positions sees those skills on their profile. For how to structure mappings and set expected proficiencies, see Understanding and creating skills mappings.

Once your foundation is in place, you can start assessing where each person stands. Tellent offers two ways to do this, and you can use either or both.

Assess from the employee profile. Go to an employee's profile and open the Skills section. You'll see every skill that applies to them, pulled in automatically from their position and the connected mappings, along with the expected proficiency for each. Click a skill, choose a level, and the assessment is saved. Profile assessments don't require a review cycle, which makes them a good fit for managers who want to update skill levels in the flow of work.

Assess as part of a review. If you'd rather evaluate skills during a structured review, skills can be included in your review forms. The reviewer evaluates each skill alongside the rest of the review, and the employee can do a self-assessment if it's enabled.

For step-by-step instructions and the full permissions matrix, see Evaluating employee skills.

Assessments only become valuable once you can read them. Tellent gives you two lenses: one for individuals, one for the organization.

The individual lens: employee profile. Each employee's profile shows their current skill levels next to the expected proficiency from their position. A color indicator tells you at a glance whether they're meeting expectations, exceeding them, or below. This is the view to open before a growth conversation. For what's shown and where it comes from, see Viewing skills on employee profiles.

The organizational lens: Skills Insights. Go to Development > Skills Insights to see your team's skills at scale. Two views work side by side:

You can filter both views by position, area of expertise, or group, so you can zoom in on a single team or look across the whole company.

For how to read the colors, drill into specific skills, and use each view in practice, see Skill analysis.

This is where insights turn into outcomes. Once you know where the gaps are, for a person, a team, or the whole company, Tellent gives you several ways to act on them.

Raise a training need in a review. When a manager and an employee are working through a review, they can flag a specific training need directly inside it. This is often the most natural moment to translate "you're below expected on cross-functional collaboration" into "let's get you into a workshop next quarter." See Bringing up training needs in reviews.

Set development goals. For longer-term growth, especially for employees who exceed expectations and are ready for the next level, create a goal tied to a specific skill or capability. Goals are tracked over time and reviewed in reviews. See How to create a goal.

Evaluate the impact of past training. Once people have completed training, the Evaluate past training option lets you measure whether it actually moved the needle. See The "Evaluate past training" option.

You've now walked through the full skills journey. Depending on where you want to go deeper: