When it comes to understanding someone’s skill level, it’s hard to beat just sitting down and having a conversation. This is why we’re eager for you to try our latest experiment—conversational Skill Review. It’s a new, AI-enabled take on one of Degreed’s longstanding skill rating tools that gives people a more detailed and accurate reflection of their skill levels. But don’t worry, no Degreed account or previous experience is necessary to try it out.
This new experiment combines two of our key interest areas: AI-enabled interactions—instead of filling out a questionnaire, you get to answer questions with your voice in real-time—and better skill data. You can try it now or read this post and try it after.
A Continuation of Our Skill Review Tradition
Degreed has seen the value in understanding and representing people’s skills for a long time. For years we’ve offered multiple ways for people to rate skills through self-ratings, manager ratings, and peer ratings. Degreed also gathers skill “signals” from assessments, ratings, and learning activities. Rounding out this list is our Skill Review questionnaire, a mainstay of the Degreed platform since 2018.
Skill Review was a project I helped manage several years ago, so I’m happy for a chance to revisit it. When we created it, the intent was to have something more accurate than a self-rating, and required a little more time and effort. The original Skill Review takes about 10 minutes; the AI-enabled version should take about half that.
Embracing a More Casual Skills Conversation
With the introduction of conversational AI (the technology we recently used for our experimental AI executive coach), we wanted to see if there are new and better ways to review and rate someone’s skill levels. We knew from previous experiments that conversational voice interactions were great for reflection. We also knew that AI was very capable of assessing a transcript based on a rubric. We wanted to see how well AI would be able to adapt to carrying a casual conversation about a person’s skill while gathering information to provide a skill level rating.
The results from our early tests are impressive: The experience is proving quicker and easier than its predecessor. It’s also proving to be quite accurate.
Have you tried it yet? Not only will the conversation help rate your core skills, but it will also help you uncover transferable skills you don’t know you have. For example, you might not be a project manager, but you can still do a Skill Review for “project management” to see if you’ve been unknowingly demonstrating project management capabilities in your work.
After your conversation about your experience in the skill, the system will analyze the conversation and generate a report on your skill level.
Let us know what you think! We’ll be gathering feedback and the results from our testing and will publish them in the near future. We believe in the potential for this new technology to help people identify their skills and be recognized for them. Stay tuned for more!
