Tracking Language Skills and proficiency

  • 10 November 2021
  • 7 replies
  • 194 views

Dear Personio- Community, 

I am looking for great ways to track the language skills and proficiency of our colleagues. 
It is not about tracking any progress of improvement, it is more meant to be an option for us in HR to see if we have to offer training sessions or information in different languages. 

Maybe some of you already have a setup in Personio that i could use? 
I would be happy to get your ideas an input. 

Thanks in advance, 

Carmen 


7 replies

Userlevel 6
Badge +18

Hi @Carmen1234,

Thank You for reaching out to the Community with your great question! I hope this turns into an interesting discussion.

In the meantime, I was wondering if you already track the language proficiency of your employees on Personio. If you do, which Attribute Type do you use?

I look forward to your reply!

Best,
Daniele

Hi @Daniele

Thanks for coming back to me. 

We haven’t started yet, but we would really love to use Personio for it. So I also hope to get some feedback from the community. 
Best, 
Carmen 

Userlevel 6
Badge +18

Hello,
I’m tagging some members who could have some insights to share: @Willem@EsterM or @Sibylle who are in Switzerland, where many languages are spoken. Otherwise @Thibaut from Swile@raddenol / @HRTech or  @Aneta.
Do you track any languages in Personio? If yes, can you help out Carmen? 😊

Best,
Daniele

Dear Carmen,
We are still in the implementation phase of Personio. Go-live will be very soon...
While language is not important to us, we all use English as a shared language, we will use “skills” to identify “Technology Stack”. The plan is to use the attribute “Skills” in tab “Personal Info”. Of course, then you only know, that someone has the skill, but not to what proficiency level.
Best regards,
Sibylle

Userlevel 2
Badge +2

Hi @Carmen1234 and @Daniele, thank you for tagging me :) 

We currently track it using attribute Tags - I added only spoken languages to the public profile (in terms of which language you can use to communicate with each colleague) - so everyone knows that for example to me they could write email in English, German, Czech or Slovak and I’ll understand them. I didn’t bother with tracking proficiency (yet).

This is how it looks in the profile
In the settings

Alternatively, to also track the proficiency, I think the solution would be to create a completely new employee info section called languages which wouldn’t be in the public profile - with a few attributes which you could name as the proficiency and then each would have set of languages which you/HR managed or employees would fill out. That way you could also export it in the report and be able to track which employees are at which level - and maybe use the data for offering language courses one day :)

I hope this helps!

Aneta

Userlevel 2
Badge +3

Hi everyone,

Same as @Sibylle we don’t actively track it, as our company language is English and even though we have both English and German templates, the company is also small enough that we know which to use for which employee. And if there’s any doubt, English is always the safest choice.

I was actually in a meeting today where all the slides were in English and, because the presenter noticed that everyone in attendance spoke German, did the meeting itself in German :slight_smile:

All the best,
Willem

Userlevel 4
Badge +13

Like @Aneta, we also use tags. This is not the best solution, though, as we have different skill levels for all the languages. This means MANY tags and also a difficulty to sort language skills within the company. It would be great to have a better option for language skills in Personio.

Your reply