Skills Insight Report - Clustering
Overview
Led the design of a sophisticated skills analysis tool that helps organizations understand their workforce capabilities across critical skill clusters like AI, data analytics, and programming. This tool serves leaders and analysts who need to make informed decisions about talent development and resource allocation
The Challenge
Organizations struggled to effectively analyze their workforce's skill sets at a cluster level. While they could search for specific skills in the Skills Insight Report (e.g., "NLP" or "C++"), they lacked the ability to understand broader capability areas. Leaders needed a way to answer questions like "Who in my organization has data analytics skills?" without manually aggregating multiple related skills.
User Research Insights
Through user testing and stakeholder interviews, we uncovered several key insights:
— User Testing Participant
"We really wanted to learn about what specific data analytical skills our employees were good at. Things like data visualization and data analysis and understanding what steps people have taken, concrete steps to become proficient in those areas."
— M2+ Leader, Microsoft
"I want to see things such as front-end skills vs. back-end skills; data processing skills; data ingestion skills. And drill down from there."
Problem Space
Manual Skill Aggregation
Users had to manually add individual skills to perform cluster analysis
Process was labor-intensive and prone to errors
No standardized way to group related skill
Limited Visibility
Difficult to understand organization-wide capabilities
No clear way to identify skill gaps
Challenges in workforce planning
The Solution
Designed an intuitive interface that enables users to:
Search and select skill clusters (e.g., data analytics)
Automatically include relevant subskills and related skills
Customize skill groupings based on organizational needs
Visualize skill distribution across the organization
Track skill trends over time
