Workday Skills Cloud

Workday Skills Cloud is the skills library and skill-suggestion feature built into Workday’s HR system, and Workday’s recruiting, learning and internal-mobility tools all draw on it. It suggests skills for each employee from what Workday already holds about them, such as job profiles, projects, courses and feedback, and builds a skill level from ratings people give or from a level another product has worked out. Workday does not publish a price, and whether you already have Skills Cloud depends on your Workday contract.

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

In one line

The skills record built into Workday, with suggestions drawn from the records Workday holds about each person and skill levels built from ratings.

Switch it on if

You run Workday’s HR system, your job profiles, project records and course completions are well kept, and you want one skills list behind recruiting, learning and internal moves. Try it in a test environment first, because it cannot be switched off.

Do not rely on it alone if

You want skills from the documents, tickets, code or sales records people produce, which reach Workday through another product, or you want skill levels without running rating rounds or importing levels. TechWolf, Gloat and Beamery each put skills into Workday alongside Skills Cloud.

Price

Not published. Under one of Workday’s two contract types it is available automatically; under the other you sign an extra order form first, and Workday does not say whether that form carries a charge.

How it works

What it does, and where its skills and levels come from

Skills Cloud sits in the core of Workday Human Capital Management, Workday’s HR system. It holds a shared library of more than 73,000 standard skills, built from data customers contribute, public data and data Workday buys, and shared with every customer that switches Skills Cloud on, while each customer’s own in-house skills stay out of it. Workday has offered Skills Cloud since October 2018, and the rest of Workday draws on it: Recruiting uses it to match candidates to jobs, Learning uses it to suggest courses, and Opportunity Marketplace and Flex Teams, which recommend internal jobs and project teams to employees, need it switched on.

It also suggests skills for each person. When employees add or edit their skills, Skills Cloud offers skills from their current job profile first, then from projects they have completed, their previous job profiles and roles they have filled in Flex Teams, and once they have added those, machine learning suggests more. An automatic process also runs every hour and suggests skills from completed courses, completed projects, job history, public feedback and the skills already on the profile. Candidates get suggestions from the CV they upload.

All of those suggestions come from records Workday holds, or from a candidate’s CV. Skills that show up in the documents, tickets, code and sales records people produce, in systems such as Jira, GitHub, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Confluence, Slack or Microsoft 365, reach Workday when an integration sends them in.

A suggestion reaches someone’s profile only when a person accepts it, so profiles fill from suggestions as fast as people act on them. Either the employee picks from a list of up to 10 at a time, or an administrator fills profiles in bulk, copying every skill from each person’s main job profile and adding suggested skills on top, 10 for each person by default and no more than 20. That bulk task cannot be undone once it has run, although each employee is told about it and can remove anything it added. Alongside the suggestions, employees can type in skills that are not in the library, and colleagues giving feedback can endorse up to 100 of a person’s skills.

Skill levels come from people rather than from records. Skills Cloud calculates a level on a five-step scale you can customise, running from Beginner through Intermediate, Experienced and Advanced to Expert, and builds it from sources you weight yourself: the latest rating from a formal skill assessment, the average of the latest ratings from colleagues asked for feedback, the employee’s latest rating of themselves, and a level worked out by another product and imported. The weights must add up to 100%, and if you set no weights, or leave skill ratings switched off, no level is calculated at all. Workday calls the result an “estimated skill level”, so it is as sound as the ratings and imported levels behind it.

For a Workday customer, then, Skills Cloud is one consistent skills list behind recruiting, learning and internal moves, filled from your own Workday records and the ratings your people give. If you also want skills drawn from the work people produce, those come from a product that writes into Skills Cloud, as TechWolf, Gloat and Beamery each do.

Fit

Who it suits

You run Workday and want one skills list behind all of it

Recruiting, Learning, Opportunity Marketplace and Flex Teams all draw on the same Skills Cloud list, and new hires can start with the skills from their recruiting stage already on their profile.

Your Workday records are well kept

The suggestions come from job profiles, completed projects, flex-team roles, courses, job history and public feedback, so they are only as good as those records. A person’s current job profile is the first place Skills Cloud looks, and an administrator can copy every skill on each person’s main job profile onto their profile in one go, so the work you have already put into job profiles carries straight across.

You already ask people to rate skills

Skills Cloud builds a skill level from formal assessments, ratings from colleagues and people’s ratings of themselves, weighted as you decide. A self-rating in a quarterly performance review counts, and skills can be added to talent review templates, so if your review cycle already asks people to rate skills, you are part of the way to having levels.

You already buy skills or test results from someone else

Skills Cloud takes in skills from other systems so they sit next to its own, and accepts a skill level worked out by another product as one of the sources for its own calculation. PwC took this route, connecting its badging system so that the skills from each new badge go straight onto the person’s Workday profile.

Limits

What switching it on commits you to

Switching Skills Cloud on commits you to several things, and the first cannot be reversed, so go through all of them before anyone turns it on.

Switching it on cannot be undone

Once you switch Skills Cloud on, you cannot switch it off, and your system keeps returning Skills Cloud results even if you later opt out. Workday recommends switching it on in a test environment before your live system, which is where to look at real profiles before you decide anything.

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

An automatic clean-up replaces your own skills that exactly match, or are synonyms of, a Skills Cloud skill with Workday’s standard wording. The change is irreversible and there is no opting out of the clean-up. Skills your administrators created are shielded from synonym changes by default when you first switch it on, and administrators can exclude individual skills, but skills employees typed in themselves cannot be excluded. Workday then reviews the skills in your system four times a year. If the exact wording of your skills matters to you, get the list of what will change from the test environment first.

A skill level takes a rating programme

Administrators can launch skill assessments for up to 50,000 employees at once, add skill ratings to feedback requests and let people rate themselves, but somebody still has to run those rounds and decide how much each source counts. The calculated level does not show when employees click a skill on a career profile, or in Workday’s Android, iPad and iPhone apps, so people who use Workday mainly on their phones will not see their level there.

Matching on your own skills comes with conditions

If you keep more than 2,000 skills of your own, Workday recommends cutting the list before you use them in matching. Matching on your own skills works only in English, does not work with Workday’s candidate matching or with skills reporting in People Analytics, and applies only to skills that appear on 20 different employee profiles or job requisitions that also carry a Skills Cloud skill. If your own skill names matter to how you move people, ask how many of them would qualify.

The library stays inside Workday

Each employee’s skills and levels can come in from other systems and go back out through an integration, but the Skills Cloud library itself cannot be exported or viewed as a list, and you cannot choose which library skills your people see and pick from. If you later move to another system, each person’s skills go with you and the library they were chosen from stays behind.

Three smaller points affect how complete and readable your profiles will be. Certifications do not produce skill suggestions, so employees link their certifications to skills by hand. Suggestions based on position history appear only if you opt in to them, so decide before the rollout whether you want them. The descriptions attached to library skills are written with Google’s Gemini AI, and they can be read but not edited, are in English only for now and may not exist for every skill.

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

Its figures

What its figures measure

Workday backs Skills Cloud with four figures, and each one measures something specific.

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

Both figures are averages from Workday’s own analysis across all customers with data between July 2023 and June 2025. Before either goes into your business case, ask how many customers are in the average and what they were compared against.

30% of the Fortune 500Companies using Skills Cloud

More than 65% of the Fortune 500 use Workday, so fewer than half of Workday’s Fortune 500 customers use Skills Cloud. The figure counts companies, which is a different thing from how complete their employees’ profiles are.

90% rise in recorded skillsPwC, one year

PwC’s percentage of recorded skills rose 90% in one year and now covers non-technical skills too. The figure measures how fast recording grew at PwC, rather than how many of its people now have a full profile.

16 languagesSkills Cloud library

The library comes in Chinese (simplified and traditional), Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French (Canada and France), German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish. Where a translation is missing, or someone’s preferred language is not supported, the skill shows in English, and integrations load library skills into Workday, or pull them out, only in English. If a large part of your workforce works in another language, check the list before you plan a rollout.

Money and contracts

What it costs, and what your contract decides

Workday does not publish a price, a minimum number of employees or a target company size for Skills Cloud, and whether you already have it depends on your Workday contract.

Workday has two kinds of customer contract: the Main Service Agreement (MSA) and the Universal Main Service Agreement (UMSA). On the UMSA, Skills Cloud is available automatically. On the MSA, you switch it on through what Workday calls Innovation Services, features that go beyond its core products, which means signing an Innovation Services addendum first, with the order form coming from your Customer Success Manager. Workday does not say whether that form carries a charge.

When Workday launched Skills Cloud in October 2018, it came at no additional cost to HR customers who subscribed to Innovation Services. If Workday tells you Skills Cloud is included in your contract, get that in writing.

Your contract also decides what happens to your data, because the shared library is built partly from data customers contribute. On the UMSA, contributions are switched on automatically for AI features in the products you have bought, and turning them off can degrade a feature or stop it working, so ask whether that applies to Skills Cloud. On the MSA, Workday recommends switching Skills Cloud on through an Innovation Service that does not require you to contribute data, while also recommending that you contribute. If you later opt out of contributing, 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.

There is a second route to this. The same job, built on the systems you already run, is usually a narrower piece of work, and we have mapped what that version looks like. See it as an agent

Before you switch it on

What to ask Workday

Open a real employee’s profile and show us, for each suggested skill, which record it came from: which job profile, project, course or piece of feedback. Which suggestions come from machine learning, and what are those based on?
Your AI fact sheet on suggested skills is available only behind your customer sign-in. Will you send it to us, and what share of suggested skills do employees accept?
Are we on the MSA or the UMSA? Does switching on Skills Cloud, skill levels, Opportunity Marketplace or Career Hub change what we pay, or need a new order form?
Because switching it on cannot be undone, will you switch it on in our test environment before we go live and give us the list of our own skills that will be merged or replaced, and which are protected by default?
For customers like us, what share of employees end up with a calculated skill level, and which rating sources and weightings do they use?
For the 26% higher internal hire rate and 5% lower voluntary turnover, how many customers are in the average, and what were they compared against?
Which of our data would go into the shared Skills Cloud library, and what stops working if we switch that contribution off?
If we later add a product that reads the work our people do, how do its skills and levels get into Workday, and what happens to skills in languages other than English?

Other options

Alternatives to Workday Skills Cloud, including buying nothing

The main alternatives to Workday Skills Cloud are TechWolf, Gloat and Beamery, which put skills into Workday alongside it, and Microsoft People Skills if your people also work in Microsoft 365. The first choice is whether to add one of them at all, or keep Skills Cloud on its own.

If you run Workday, the decision in front of you is whether Workday’s own suggestions are enough, or whether to add a product that writes skills into Workday alongside Skills Cloud. Opportunity Marketplace and Flex Teams need Skills Cloud switched on in either case.

Start with Skills Cloud itself: switch it on in a test environment first, as Workday recommends, fill profiles from job profiles and suggestions, and read what comes back for a few teams you know well. If the profiles look right for the decisions you need to make, stop there and buy nothing else. And if all you need is the overall shape of the skills gap rather than an accurate picture of each person, the records you already keep can give you that.

If the profiles stay thin, look at TechWolf next, a company Workday has both backed and used: Workday Ventures invested in TechWolf’s 2024 funding round, and the two companies mapped 15,000 Workday employees to 300 roles in three months and put the job-to-skill mappings into Workday’s HR system. Reaching validated skills with TechWolf takes three to six months, and its price is not published.

Gloat and Beamery also put skills into Workday alongside Skills Cloud. In Gloat’s words, “Skills Cloud becomes the taxonomy; Gloat fills it with evidence”, meaning Skills Cloud holds the list of skills and Gloat supplies the evidence for each person. Beamery pushes skills, with their proficiency, onto existing Workday job profiles, and needs Skills Cloud switched on to do it. If you look at more than one of the three, compare the sources each draws skills from at customers already using it, because those sources are what will reach your people’s profiles.

If your company also uses Microsoft People Skills alongside Workday, its administrators can import employees’ skills from other platforms and export the skills each employee has confirmed. Before you rely on both, ask Microsoft and Workday how skills would move from one to the other.

Skills Cloud is built into the core of Workday’s HR system and switched on through your Workday contract, so if you do not run Workday it is not a realistic starting point. Our guide to the whole skills intelligence market sets out the products that read people’s work, the ones that read HR records, and what each of them costs.