Workday Skills Cloud

Workday Skills Cloud is a skills library built into Workday’s HR system. It suggests skills for each employee from records Workday holds already, such as job profiles, projects, courses and feedback. It also builds a skill level from ratings people give, or from a level made by another product. Turning it on cannot be undone. The price sits inside your Workday contract, which also decides whether it is switched on.

By Ashish Manchanda Published 16 Sep 2026 Last updated 16 Sep 2026

In one line

The skills record built into Workday. Its suggestions come from Workday’s own records, and its levels come from ratings.

Switch it on if

You run Workday’s HR system, and your job profiles and project records are well kept. Turning it on cannot be undone. Test it in a separate system first, as Workday recommends.

Do not rely on it alone if

You want skills read from documents, tickets, code or sales records people produce. Those reach Workday only through another product. You want skill levels without running rating rounds yourself. TechWolf, Gloat and Beamery each add skills to Workday alongside Skills Cloud.

Price

Set by your Workday contract. One contract type switches Skills Cloud on automatically. The other needs you to sign an extra form. Get in writing whether that form costs anything.

Workday Skills Cloud pulls suggestions from your own HR records

Skills Cloud sits inside Workday Human Capital Management, Workday’s HR system. It holds a shared library of more than 73,000 skills. The library is built from data customers contribute, public data and data Workday buys. Each customer’s own in-house skills stay out of it. Workday’s recruiting and learning tools draw skills from that same library. So do its internal jobs board, Opportunity Marketplace, and its project staffing tool, Flex Teams. Those last two need Skills Cloud switched on to work at all.

Skills Cloud also suggests skills for each person. It offers suggestions from their current job profile first. Then it adds skills from finished projects, past job profiles and Flex Team roles. A separate process runs every hour and adds more suggestions. Sources include completed projects, courses, job history, public feedback and the skills already on the profile. Candidates get their suggestions from the CV they upload.

Skills in the documents, code and sales records people produce never reach Workday on their own. That includes work in Jira, GitHub, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Confluence, Slack or Microsoft 365. Another product has to connect to Workday and send them in.

A suggestion only reaches a profile once a person accepts it. An employee can pick from up to 10 suggestions at a time. An administrator can also fill profiles in bulk. By default, this adds 10 suggested skills for each person. The most it can add is 20. That bulk action cannot be undone. Each employee is told about it and can remove what it added. Employees can also type in skills that are not in the library. Colleagues giving feedback can endorse up to 100 of a person’s skills. Skill levels work differently. They come from ratings, not from records. You can adjust the five-step scale, from Beginner to Expert. Those ratings include the latest formal assessment and the average of the latest colleague feedback. They also include the latest self-rating and a level imported from another product. You weight each source. The weights must add up to 100%. If you set no weights, or leave skill ratings switched off, no level is calculated. Workday calls the result an estimated skill level.

It suits Workday customers with well-kept HR records

It gives Workday customers one skills list across every tool

Every Workday tool that uses skills pulls from the same Skills Cloud list. A new hire can start with the skills already on their profile from when they applied.

Its suggestions are only as good as your own records

An administrator can copy every skill from a person’s main job profile onto their Skills Cloud profile in one step. So work already put into job profiles carries straight across.

Ratings people already give can build the skill level

Skills Cloud builds a skill level from formal assessments, ratings from colleagues and self-ratings. A self-rating in a quarterly review counts too. Skills can be added to the forms used in talent reviews.

Skill levels from other systems can feed into it

Skills Cloud can take in skills from other systems and show them next to its own. It can also use a skill level worked out by another product as one of its ratings. PwC connected its badging system this way. Each new badge’s skills now go straight onto the person’s Workday profile.

Turning it on cannot be undone, and it rewrites your wording

Workday says to test it before you switch it on

Deciding later to opt out does not stop Skills Cloud results. Workday recommends switching it on in a test copy of Workday first, not your live one. Look at real profiles in that test copy before you decide.

It rewrites some of your skills, and you cannot stop it

Skills Cloud runs an automatic clean-up four times a year. When one of your skills matches or means the same as a Skills Cloud skill, Workday swaps in its wording. You cannot undo this, and you cannot opt out. Skills your administrators made are protected from synonym changes by default. Administrators can protect other skills one by one, but not skills employees typed in themselves.

Someone has to run the rating rounds

Administrators can launch skill assessments for up to 50,000 employees at once. They can add skill ratings to feedback requests, and let people rate themselves. The calculated level does not show when an employee clicks a skill on their career profile. It also does not show in Workday’s Android, iPad or iPhone apps. Anyone who uses Workday mainly on a phone will not see their skill level there.

Matching people on your own skill names has real limits

Workday can use skill names you created for matching. If you keep more than 2,000 of them, Workday recommends cutting the list first. This matching works only in English. It does not work in Workday’s candidate matching or its People Analytics skills reports. A skill needs to sit on at least 20 profiles or job openings that also carry a Skills Cloud skill.

The skill library itself cannot leave Workday

Each employee’s own skills and levels can move in and out of other systems through a connection Workday sets up. The Skills Cloud library itself is different. You cannot export the whole library, or view it as a full list. You also cannot choose which library skills your people see and pick from. If you move to another HR system later, each person’s own skills go with you. The library those skills were chosen from stays behind.

Certifications do not produce skill suggestions on their own. Employees link certifications to skills by hand. Suggestions based on someone’s position history only appear if you opt in to them. The descriptions attached to library skills are written by Google’s Gemini AI. You can read them, but you cannot edit them. They are in English only right now. Some skills may have no description at all.

Rolling Skills Cloud out takes as much organisational work as technical work. PwC set itself the goal of moving all its data from its previous skills tool into Skills Cloud. PwC warns that switching on the technology is not enough on its own. As PwC puts it, “if you don’t support your business in driving the behavioral change, that change can fall flat”.

Each figure measures something narrower than it sounds

Workday publishes four figures for Skills Cloud.

26% higher internal hire rate, 5% lower voluntary turnoverCustomers with data, July 2023 to June 2025

Both figures are averages. Workday worked them out from its own analysis of customers with data from July 2023 to June 2025.

30% of the Fortune 500Companies using Skills Cloud

More than 65% of the Fortune 500 use Workday. So this figure means fewer than half of Workday’s Fortune 500 customers use Skills Cloud. It counts companies, not how complete their employee profiles are.

90% rise in recorded skillsPwC, one year

PwC’s share of recorded skills rose 90% in one year. PwC’s count now includes non-technical skills too. That figure measures how fast recording grew at PwC. It does not measure how many of its people now have a full profile.

16 languagesSkills Cloud library

The library covers Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French for Canada and France, German, Italian and Swedish. It also covers Chinese for simplified and traditional, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Norwegian and Spanish. If a translation is missing, or the language is not supported, the skill shows in English instead. Connections that load library skills into Workday, or pull them out, also work only in English.

Your Workday contract decides what you pay and whether it is on

Workday does not publish a price, a minimum number of employees or a target company size for Skills Cloud. Get the price, and any minimum company size, in writing from Workday.

Workday has two kinds of customer contract. They are called the Main Service Agreement (MSA) and the Universal Main Service Agreement (UMSA). If you are on the UMSA, Skills Cloud switches on automatically. If you are on the MSA, you switch it on yourself. You do that through Innovation Services, extra features that go beyond Workday’s core products. That means signing an extra form first, called an Innovation Services addendum. Workday sends you that form. Workday does not say whether that form carries a charge.

Workday launched Skills Cloud in October 2018. At that time, it cost HR customers nothing extra, as long as they already subscribed to Innovation Services. Get any promise that Skills Cloud is included in your contract today in writing.

Your contract also decides what happens to your data. The shared library is built partly from data customers contribute. On the UMSA, this data contribution switches on automatically for the AI features in the products you buy. Turning it off can make a feature worse, or stop it working. On the MSA, switching Skills Cloud on does not require you to contribute data. At the same time, Workday also recommends that you do contribute. If you opt out later, your contributed data is deleted within 30 days.

Career Hub, which suggests roles to employees from their skills, has conditions of its own. To use its machine-learning features, you must be a Career Hub customer and meet certain requirements.

You could also build this on your own systems. We have mapped what that looks like. See it as an agent

What to ask Workday before you switch it on

Can you show us where each suggested skill on a real profile comes from? Good answer: Yes, with the job profile, project, course or feedback named for each suggestion.
Will you send us your AI fact sheet on suggested skills, since it sits behind your customer sign-in? Good answer: Yes, a copy of the fact sheet, plus the share of suggestions employees actually accept.
Are we on the MSA or the UMSA, and does switching on Skills Cloud change what we pay? Good answer: A clear answer on our contract type, and whether it needs a new order form.
Will you switch Skills Cloud on first in our test system, not our live one? Good answer: Yes. Also the list of skills that would be merged or replaced, and which are protected by default.
For a company our size, what share of employees end up with a calculated skill level? Good answer: A real number, plus which rating sources feed it and how they are weighted.
How many customers sit behind your 26% higher internal hire rate and 5% lower turnover figures? Good answer: A customer count, and what Workday compared those customers against.
Which of our data would go into the shared Skills Cloud library? Good answer: A list of what we contribute, and what stops working if we turn that off.
If we add a product that reads our people’s actual work, how do its skills reach Workday? Good answer: A named path for skills to reach Workday, and how non-English skills are handled.

Add TechWolf, Gloat or Beamery if records fall short

TechWolf, Gloat and Beamery each add skills to Workday alongside Skills Cloud. Microsoft People Skills is a special case, if your people also work in Microsoft 365. Your first choice is whether to add one of these, or keep Skills Cloud on its own.

Start with Skills Cloud itself. Switch it on in a test system first, as Workday recommends. Fill profiles from job profiles and suggestions. Then look at the results for a few teams you know well. If those profiles look right for the decisions you need to make, buy nothing else. You may only need the overall shape of your skills gap, not an exact picture of each person. The records you already keep can give you that.

If profiles stay thin, look at TechWolf next. Workday has both backed and used this company. Workday Ventures invested in TechWolf’s 2024 funding round. The two companies then worked together. They mapped 15,000 Workday employees to 300 roles in three months. They also loaded the skills for each job into Workday’s HR system. Reaching validated skills with TechWolf takes three to six months, and its price is not published.

In Gloat’s words, “Skills Cloud becomes the taxonomy; Gloat fills it with evidence”. In plain terms, Skills Cloud holds the list of skills, and Gloat supplies the proof behind each person’s skills. Beamery adds skills to existing Workday job profiles, along with how skilled the person is at each one. It needs Skills Cloud switched on to do that. If you look at more than one of the three, compare where each one gets its skills. Talk to customers already using each product.

If your company also uses Microsoft People Skills alongside Workday, Microsoft’s administrators can bring in employees’ skills from other platforms. They can also export the skills each employee has confirmed. Before you rely on both tools, get a clear answer from Microsoft and Workday on how skills move between them.

If you do not run Workday, Skills Cloud is not a realistic place to start. Our guide to the whole skills intelligence market sets out the products that read people’s actual work. It also names the ones that read HR records instead, and what each one costs.