Learn what soft skills and hard skills are used for in the Recognition module. Admins can create, edit, merge, and review endorsements for both skill types.

This is the overview of skill-based recognition. For the whole module, start with Recognition - Module Overview. For reporting across endorsements, open Recognition Module - Dashboard and Reporting.

Soft Skills and Hard Skills are part of a recognition dynamic where peers choose someone in their organization to assign feedback.

Users can endorse a peer on one or more Soft Skills and Hard Skills.

Soft Skills are created by admins in the backoffice, while Hard Skills are added by each user to their own profile. Peers can then endorse you on the Hard Skills you added.

In Modules > Recognition > Soft Skills you can create, edit and delete soft skills.

Each skill needs a name and an image, and can have a background color. For optimal display, use a round image of 500x500 pixels, in translucent PNG or JPG. If skill tags are enabled for your company, each soft skill also needs a Skill Tag. See Soft Skills - Manage Soft Skills.

In Modules > Recognition > Recognition Settings you can enable or disable soft skill and hard skill endorsements and limit how many each user can give. For every option, see Recognition Settings - Configuration Guide.

The option Only Team Managers can review? applies to Star Badge reviews only, not to skill endorsements.

Remember that collecting data from community interactions about Soft Skills endorsements allows us to build a comprehensive map of both formal and informal skills across the organization. This also helps us discover hidden talents.

Because each user defines their own Hard Skills, the same skill can appear under several names. In Modules > Recognition > Hard Skills you can rename and delete hard skills, and select two or more skills and click Merge to combine duplicates into one.

The list also shows, for each hard skill, how many users have it (Users) and how many endorsements it received (Endorsements).

Click the number of users of a hard skill to see who added it to their recognition profile.

Click the number of endorsements of a skill to see who endorsed whom, and when. You can filter this list and request an export by email; the exported report includes all hard skill endorsements, not only the filtered ones.

Endorsements, star badge reviews and their exports are in Modules > Recognition > Dashboard. See Recognition Module - Dashboard and Reporting.

In the recognition module, on the Me tab, users scroll down to the hard skills section.

There, by pressing Add skills, they can choose from the hard skills already created in the company or, if they can't find the one they are looking for, use Create skill.

Users can also remove hard skills from their own recognition page.