Implementation management Qualifications

In the first part of this blog series, we saw how qualification requirements can be defined in SAP. That is, we defined the critical qualifications (with the critical level of proficiency) that should be obtained by each employee in his/her position. In the present blog post, I would like to highlight how we can measure (or try to) which level of those qualifications do the employees have. So, how can we know at one point in time which employees do have a given level of proficiency in a give qualification. This can be done in many ways in SAP. We will explore mainly 2 possibilities here.

The goals is to assign to every employee a qualifications profile, i.e. a set of qualifications (Q objects) with a given level of proficiency linked to their personnel number (P object or possibly CP object). This is registered in the data model using P-Q relationships. Technically, the qualifications profile is a very simple feature. However, on a functional point of view it can prove to be very challenging. Indeed, qualifications can sometimes be uneasy to measure (what level of a given qualification do I/you have?), and improvement/loss in the level of qualification can be uneasy to model. A key aspect will be here to maintain meaningful qualifications in your qualifications catalog. A good practice would be to start with a simple qualifications catalog containing only core qualifications which are easy to model/measure.

Typically, registering certificates as qualifications in the catalog can be a good starting point (however some coule argue this is moving the complexity to the moment when the certificate is awarded). At least, we know when someone gets a certificate and if this certificate has a validity period, it can be registered in SAP using infotype 1025 for the qualification. Behavioural qualifications will be more difficult to model. But first let's see how SAP allows us to register the information.

Assessing qualifications: direct update

A first possibility to register the qualifications profile of your employees is to let them update their profile themselves. Up to ehp4, it was possible for employees to fill in/update their qualification profile directly via the Skills Profile iView in Employee Self-Service. This allowed direct update of the P-Q relationships in the back-end (and thus of the infotype 0024, if integrated with PD in the switch PLOGI QUALI). It was also possible to initiate a workflow to add manager approval whenever a skill was changed in the profile. This was triggered by entries in table T779W (or its customer version T779X). See also this wiki for more information on the triggering of the workflow.