Absorb Skills is a mechanism that allows Learners to create a playlist of recommended/related Courses to improve their expertise or advance in their careers.

Key Components

Absorb Skills features multiple elements, these are as follows:

• Job Role

• Skill

• Self-Assessment

• Learning Path

• Skills Profile

Terminology

Skills is a collective term, and our product name. This is because Skills is a universally well-understood term for this subject and common across all industries, markets, and roles.

Skills can be defined as follows:

• Broken down into five levels (Proficiency Levels from 1-5).

• Think of these as more tangible items, like "Microsoft Excel" and "soft skills", like "Leadership".

• Categories and descriptions are associated to group similar Skills. 

Constraints

At the time of release, use of Absorb Skills involves the following restrictions:

• Absorb Skills is a paid feature, please reach out to your Client Success representative to discuss this purchase.

• Next Generation Learner Experience (NGLE) and Admin Refresh are required to use Absorb Skills.

• The Lightcast library of data that Absorb Skills is built around is English ONLY, and will not be translated to other languages.

  • This includes Job Roles (and their subsequent descriptions), and Skills (and their subsequent descriptions).

• The machine learning model that powers the Course Recommendations provided by Absorb Skills ONLY supports English courses.

  • The clients can manually Tag Courses in other Courses if they wish, but these Skill tags are English only (as they are populated by the Lightcast data library).

Absorb Content Page

The Absorb Content page allows for streamlined Content Discovery and Course Conversion.

A new Skills filter has been added to the report so an Admin can easily review Job Roles and/or Skills they would like to find Courses to cover.

Once the filter is applied, the list of courses is returned for the Skills in the chosen Job Role.

Once the set of Courses is available, they can be bulk converted into the LMS Courses report, with options to set Enrollment Rules and categorize content.

Additionally, Skill data is brought into the LMS Course object upon conversion. This operation also happens when adding a Content Libraries Learning Object into an existing Course. This means both Course and Lesson-level conversions from the content library will bring in the mapped Skills onto the Edit Course form.

Machine Learning

The Skills associated with content libraries have been tagged via our own Machine Learning Model, and this is a defining benefit of Absorb Skills. The same algorithm is used when recommending skills for courses. Skill labels are added to Courses based on title, descriptions and meta-data.

We look at Course Title, Topic, Description, and any Tags the vendor has added to assist in the categorization of the Course. To train the model that is generating the label predictions we used Courses that have been manually labelled by Absorb SMEs, contractors, and a specialty organization.