About Specialties in Setup

Specialties are used to track certifications, skills, and staffing. The term specialties throughout the Help and documentation encompasses legacy specialties, skills, and certifications. Significant specialty changes in the application have been released and bundled in this single topic to facilitate information flow.

Specialties in general can be used to...

  • Qualify people for working opportunities that match the positions’ specialty requirement. A yellow traingle appears next to a person’s name on the Roster when the person does not meet a specialty requirement at the position level.
  • Set Roster Count Alarms to alert supervisors when staffing shortages occur or to prevent staffing shortages before they occur.
  • Trigger dynamic issues for time off requests to prevent a specialty from going below the minimum staffing level.

When a specialty contains a date in the From and Through fields, then that specialty activates and deactivates according to the dates provided. The start date is defined by the start of the calendar day, and the end date is defined by the end of a calendar day. See Real Time Profile Name and Specialties... for important changes and upgrade information.

When Institution Focus is turned on along with differing timezones, then the start and end times are based on the focused institution’s timezone. This means if the server is EST, and the focused institution is PST, the application uses the focused institution’s time zone to determine whether a specialty is valid for the date criteria.

Additionally, the Fill by Rules window evaluates a period in time not the Calendar day. An employee must have the specialty through the end of the Roster record to qualify for a position or job.

For example, a job that starts on 10/01/2016 at 7:30AM and runs through 10/02/2016 at 7:30AM means an employee whose specialty expires on 10/01/2016 would not qualify for this vacancy because their specialty expires after midnight. However, if that same job starts at 7:30AM and it runs for 12 hours then the person is qualified because the specialty has not expired during the Start and End time of the vacancy.

Customers with Dimensions integration use Skills & Certifications, not legacy specialties. See subsequent topic, Skills & Certifications.

Skills & Certifications

In version 6.7+ specialties were redesigned to provide a simple way to manage specialty type characteristics for a person by disassociating specialty attritbutes from the person’s Profile. These specilaty attributes are skills and certifications. Using skills and certifications rather than legacy specialties reduces unnecessary profiles, and creation of profile resulting from profile changes and single specialties with various effective dates.

Customers using Dimensions must manage skills and certifications in Dimensions the system of record for skills and certifications. User inputs in this application via editing rights is not recommended as this could cause undesirable synchronization issues. All historical skills and certifications an employee holds, including expired, are pushed into this application. Moreover, the Dimensions application only displays currently active skills and certifications. If applying rules to qualify personnel based on skills and certifications you must review the base type People Filter <Person> argument topic to properly set the proficiency level field.

The Specialty area in Setup contains three types of specialty options to configure. Choices are:

  1. Specialty (legacy)
  2. Skills
  3. Certifications

Legacy type specialties remain the same to support backward compatibility. The recommended configuration path is to use Skills & Certifications because they are detached from the person’s profile, facilitate maintenance, allow for multiple and overlapping effective dates, and offers clear targets for external applications when specialties are required.

Customers interested in migrating from legacy type specialties to Skills & Certifications may need to revisit configuration to target new skills and new certifications and run both legacy specialties and Skills & Certification in parallel, keep legacy specialties turned on for historical references, and eventually phase out legacy specialties or not phase out because legacy specialties are deeply rooted in the business rules and or database work flow. For migrations, we recommend an application expert to review the current configuration state before migrating to Skills & Certifications.

Skills & Certifications are located in General section of the Setup area. Configured skills and certification can be assigned to a person on the Skills & Certifications tab. Configured legacy type specialties remain unchanged, and located in the Profile tab of the person.

Specialty Reference Table:

  Specialty (Legacy) Skill Certification
Defines an attribute, characteristic, trait (Generally, not date driven) X X  
Defines a license, certification, record, permit, diploma, credential (Generally, date driven)     X
Expiration date limit X   X
Effective date limit X X X
Effective date may overlap     X
Effective date linked to Profile X    
Effective date linked to Person   X X
Expiration date linked to Profile X    
Expiration date linked to Person   X X
Not in Assignment option (shift trade validation) X X X
Skill (Level) X    
Proficiency Level   X X
Number (Reference)     X
Show Specialty option next to person’s name X X X
Show Specialty option next to position’s name X X X
Show Specialty Fail icon option on the Roster X X X
Limit in People Filter X X X
Target > Specialty base rule X X X
Setup > Roster X X X
Deploy Event X X X
Static/Dynamic Issues X X X
Expiration Report X X X
Custom report targets X X X
Person export X X X
Multi-Day Limit X X X
Assignment Template Limit X X X
Bidding X X X
Setup > General > Specialties X X X
Person: Edit Basic authority allows person to view specialty X    
Profile: Add/Edit or Profile: Edit authority allows person to manage specialty X    
Person: View Certification authority     X
Person: View Skill authority   X  
Person: Manage Certification authority     X
Person: Manage Skill authority   X  
person designation person > Profile person > Skills & Certifications person > Skills & Certifications