Making Skills Actionable at Scale

Transforming skill data into insights for employees and managers

Skills are the core currency of modern talent decisions from development and mobility to staffing and workforce planning.

But skills data only matters if people know what to do with it.

I led the design of the Skills experience across Career Hub, connecting assessments, gaps, and development actions into a single, actionable system.

As a result, even when skills data was available, users didn’t know what to do next. This wasn’t just a UX problem, it directly impacted:

customer adoption
manager effectiveness
and confidence in Eightfold’s AI-driven recommendations

Role
Lead Product Designer
Company
Eightfold.ai
Timeline
H2 2024 – H2 2025
Platform
Enterprise SaaS (Web)
Users
Employees, Managers, Org Leaders, Admin
Scope of Work
- Skills Assessments
- Skill Gap Identification
- Development Plans
- Manager Skill Insights
My Responsibilities
- Experience strategy & systems design
- End-to-end UX across multiple surfaces
- AI-informed interaction design
- Cross-functional collaboration (PM, Eng, UXR)
- Design reviews & customer validation
Business Impact
- Unblocked critical customer workflows (DTAG, Amdocs)
- Enabled Early Availability rollout
- Established foundation for scalable, skills-first talent insights

THE CORE ISSUE

Assessments lived in dense, difficult to interpret tables

Managers lacked a scalable way to review team skills and gaps

Employees couldn’t easily understand what mattered and what to act on

Career Hub resources are disconnected from assessment insights

Research

LEARNING GOAL

We aimed to understand how skill data could meaningfully drive action across employees, managers, and teams.

RESEARCH INPUTS

In-depth customer conversations and early input partnership to understand real-world workflows, organizational constraints, and how skills were being used (or worked around) in practice.
Observed how users record, track, and interpreted skills data in current workflows.

Skill proficiency data is inconsistently captured and largely manual today. There is no clear feedback loop connecting insights to actions, or actions to measurable outcomes.
Ran collaborative working sessions to align on technical constraints, map skill data flows across surfaces, and pressure-test assumptions across personas before moving into solution design.

I can see my skill gaps, but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with them.

JULIAN, EMPLOYEE

KEY INSIGHTS

Users don’t struggle with rating skills, they struggle with interpreting them. Numeric proficiency without context led to confusion and inaction.

Categories matter more than precision. Employees responded better to meaningful groupings of data than raw scores.

Skill gaps only matter if they lead somewhere. Surfacing gaps without pathways to action reduced trust in the system.

Managers need aggregation first, detail second. They want to know where to focus before diving into individual profiles.

STRATEGIC TAKEAWAY

Skill data existed, but it wasn’t designed to function as a decision-making system.

EMPLOYEE • SKILL ASSESSMENTS

Clear Skills. Clearer Growth Path.

Designing the employee experience to make skill proficiencies easy to understand and to empower meaningful action from skill gap awareness.

VISUALIZING

Making Skill Data Understandable at a Glance

To empower confident action, skill proficiency must be intuitively understandable. Making skill data understandable rethinks how skills are visualized, explored, and interpreted so users can quickly understand where they stand without decoding raw data.

Visualizing what matters

🔍 RESEARCH FINDING

Employees are overwhelmed with raw skill assessment data and they spend more time scanning and filtering than understanding.

Icons are added to skill tags to clearly signal whether a skill is a strength, opportunity, or at the expected level, helping employees quickly understand their current proficiency.

Skill descriptions provide immediate clarity and shared context.

Raw skill assessment data is visualized as relative bars, enabling employees to quickly compare their proficiency against role benchmarks and identify gaps at a glance.

Rich contextual skill menu

When users need more context or want to take action, the skill menu brings understanding and next steps together, putting clarity, control and decision making in one place.

Contextual actions allow employees to edit, highlight or add skills to plans to development plans.

Assessment details

To support deeper understanding, the ratings popover reveals detailed numeric scores along clear descriptions for each proficiency level.

Granular visibility into skill ratings across different inputs.

Skill proficiency can be inferred with AI from rich, real world signals captured across the employee’s work

ALIGNING

Get a second, third, fourth… opinion

Skills are shaped through collaboration. Supporting peer assessments and flexible assessor selection allows skill data to capture diverse perspectives and reflect how skills are experienced in real work.

Peer assessment request

🔍 RESEARCH FINDING

Peers were seen as the must trusted signal for day-to-day skills. Feedback from colleagues who worked closely together was consistently perceived as more accurate and actionable.

Assessor selection gives employees flexibility over which perspectives contribute to their skill data, supporting a more balanced assessment.

Employees can choose specific skills or include all skills when requesting assessments, depending on the level of feedback wanted.

It’s all about the details

The skill details panel consolidates everything related to a skill. From definition, assessments, endorsements, and goal history to give users a complete, contextual view in one place.

Contextual actions allow employees to move seamlessly from understanding a skill to taking meaningful next steps, keeping insight and momentum in the same place.

Assessment details provide transparent, multi-perspective view of how the skill is perceived, helping users build trust in the data and understand nuance across feedback.

Endorsements add qualitative context and social proof, reinforcing credibility and showing how skills are recognized and valued in real work.

ACTING

Making Skill Data Actionable

For skill data to create real impact, insight must translate into action. Making skill data actionable means surfacing the right next steps at the moment of awareness—so users can move seamlessly from understanding gaps to taking meaningful action.

Actions bar

🔍 RESEARCH FINDING

Long, undifferentiated lists of skills make it difficult for employees to identify priorities, limiting their ability to act on what matters most even when ratings are available.

Relevant actions are surfaced contextually within each skill category, enabling employees to proactively take steps towards skills development.

Create or browse development plans and add skills to improve.

Skills are grouped into gap categories such as strengths and opportunity so employees can quickly focus on areas that need attention.

Close the gap

Employees can close the loop on skill gaps by adding them directly into development plans and receiving recommended courses or projects to close the gap.

Selecting assessors

Employees can switch between assessors to view skill proficiency from multiple perspectives, helping them understand context, differences, and potential blind spots.

GROWING

Making Skill Data Actionable for Career Growth

Skill data becomes even more powerful when it supports what’s next. Comparing proficiency against role benchmarks helps employees gauge readiness and target growth toward future roles.

🔍 RESEARCH FINDING

Employees viewed skills as a career signal, not just a performance metric. Many employees wanted to understand how their current skills translated to future roles, not just how they performed in their current one.

Skills to grow into

Seeing which skills are missing for a desired role helps employees understand what to learn next and removes guesswork from career growth.

Plan for missing skills

Contextual actions guide employees to set skills as goals or add them directly to development plans, helping them prepare for target roles.

MANAGER • TEAM INSIGHTS

Turning Team Skills into Action

Managers don’t just need visibility into team skills, they need clarity on where to focus and what to do next. This experience surfaces team-level skill gaps, strengths, and team insights in a way that supports proactive decision-making, helping managers address risks early and guide development with confidence.

CONTEXTUALIZING

Making Skill Data Work for Teams

Managing skills is complex at every level, from people managers to directors. Manager insights simplify this complexity by highlighting what matters most and guiding timely, confident action.

🔍 RESEARCH FINDING

Managers across roles rely on manual, fragmented tools to track team skills, making it difficult to prioritize, act, and defend decisions. There is a strong need for a centralized, skills-first view that surfaces team health at a glance, supports drill-down when needed, and pairs insight with clear next actions. Lightweight, explainable metrics augmented by AI recommendations and supporting evidence help managers move faster, stay fair, and address skill gaps proactively.

Making Skills Actionable at Scale

Transforming skill data into insights for employees and managers

Skills are the core currency of modern talent decisions from development and mobility to staffing and workforce planning.

But skills data only matters if people know what to do with it.

I led the design of the Skills experience across Career Hub, connecting assessments, gaps, and development actions into a single, actionable system.

As a result, even when skills data was available, users didn’t know what to do next. This wasn’t just a UX problem, it directly impacted:

customer adoption

manager effectiveness

and confidence in Eightfold’s AI-driven recommendations

Overview

Users & Scope

Responsibilities

THE CORE ISSUE

Assessments lived in dense, difficult to interpret tables

Managers lacked a scalable way to review team skills and gaps

Employees couldn’t easily understand what mattered and what to act on

Career Hub resources are disconnected from assessment insights

Research

LEARNING GOAL

We aimed to understand how skill data could meaningfully drive action across employees, managers, and teams.

RESEARCH INPUTS

Enterprise customer feedback

User interviews

Cross-function workshops

I can see my skill gaps, but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with them.

KEY INSIGHTS

Users don’t struggle with rating skills, they struggle with interpreting them. Numeric proficiency without context led to confusion and inaction.

Categories matter more than precision. Employees responded better to meaningful groupings of data than raw scores.

Skill gaps only matter if they lead somewhere. Surfacing gaps without pathways to action reduced trust in the system.

Managers need aggregation first, detail second. They want to know where to focus before diving into individual profiles.

STRATEGIC TAKEAWAY

Skill data existed, but it wasn’t designed to function as a decision-making system.

Clear Skills. Clearer Growth Path.

Designing the employee experience to make skill proficiencies easy to understand and to empower meaningful action from skill gap awareness.

Making Skill Data Understandable at a Glance

To empower confident action, skill proficiency must be intuitively understandable. Making skill data understandable rethinks how skills are visualized, explored, and interpreted so users can quickly understand where they stand without decoding raw data.

Visualizing what matters

🔍 RESEARCH FINDING

Employees are overwhelmed with raw skill assessment data and they spend more time scanning and filtering than understanding.

Icons are added to skill tags to clearly signal whether a skill is a strength, opportunity, or at the expected level, helping employees quickly understand their current proficiency.

Skill descriptions provide immediate clarity and shared context.

Raw skill assessment data is visualized as relative bars, enabling employees to quickly compare their proficiency against role benchmarks and identify gaps at a glance.

Rich contextual skill menu

When users need more context or want to take action, the skill menu brings understanding and next steps together, putting clarity, control and decision making in one place.

Contextual actions allow employees to edit, highlight or add skills to plans to development plans.

Assessment details

To support deeper understanding, the ratings popover reveals detailed numeric scores along clear descriptions for each proficiency level.

Granular visibility into skill ratings across different inputs.

Skill proficiency can be inferred with AI from rich, real world signals captured across the employee’s work

Get a second, third, fourth… opinion

Skills are shaped through collaboration. Supporting peer assessments and flexible assessor selection allows skill data to capture diverse perspectives and reflect how skills are experienced in real work.

Peer assessment request

🔍 RESEARCH FINDING

Peers were seen as the must trusted signal for day-to-day skills. Feedback from colleagues who worked closely together was consistently perceived as more accurate and actionable.

Assessor selection gives employees flexibility over which perspectives contribute to their skill data, supporting a more balanced assessment.

Employees can choose specific skills or include all skills when requesting assessments, depending on the level of feedback wanted.

It’s all about the details

The skill details panel consolidates everything related to a skill. From definition, assessments, endorsements, and goal history to give users a complete, contextual view in one place.

Contextual actions allow employees to move seamlessly from understanding a skill to taking meaningful next steps, keeping insight and momentum in the same place.

Assessment details provide transparent, multi-perspective view of how the skill is perceived, helping users build trust in the data and understand nuance across feedback.

Endorsements add qualitative context and social proof, reinforcing credibility and showing how skills are recognized and valued in real work.

Making Skill Data Actionable

For skill data to create real impact, insight must translate into action. Making skill data actionable means surfacing the right next steps at the moment of awareness—so users can move seamlessly from understanding gaps to taking meaningful action.

Actions bar

🔍 RESEARCH FINDING

Long, undifferentiated lists of skills make it difficult for employees to identify priorities, limiting their ability to act on what matters most even when ratings are available.

Relevant actions are surfaced contextually within each skill category, enabling employees to proactively take steps towards skills development.

Create or browse development plans and add skills to improve.

Skills are grouped into gap categories such as strengths and opportunity so employees can quickly focus on areas that need attention.

Close the gap

Employees can close the loop on skill gaps by adding them directly into development plans and receiving recommended courses or projects to close the gap.

Selecting assessors

Employees can switch between assessors to view skill proficiency from multiple perspectives, helping them understand context, differences, and potential blind spots.

Making Skill Data Actionable for Career Growth

Skill data becomes even more powerful when it supports what’s next. Comparing proficiency against role benchmarks helps employees gauge readiness and target growth toward future roles.

🔍 RESEARCH FINDING

Employees viewed skills as a career signal, not just a performance metric. Many employees wanted to understand how their current skills translated to future roles, not just how they performed in their current one.

Skills to grow into

Seeing which skills are missing for a desired role helps employees understand what to learn next and removes guesswork from career growth.

Plan for missing skills