Build a skills-driven workforce

A skills management platform helps organisations understand, develop and manage the skills across their workforce. It provides visibility into current capability, proficiency levels and skills gaps, while supporting areas such as targeted development, workforce planning, career progression and succession planning. 

Totara Skills helps turn skills data into practical workforce intelligence, so employees, managers and leaders can take action at every level of the organisation. 

Totara Skills helps organisations build a trusted view of workforce capability, identify and close critical skills gaps, verify role-critical skills and plan for future capability needs. This enables effective upskilling and reskilling at scale and used in conjunction with Totara Learn (Totara’s Learning Management System), targeted learning seamlessly supports skills development. 

It also supports employee development, career pathways, internal mobility, succession planning and skills-based workforce planning. 

A skills management platform helps compare the skills and proficiency people have today with the requirements of their roles, teams or organisation. 

Totara Skills gives you visibility into gaps across individuals, teams and the wider workforce, helping you prioritise development around the capabilities that matter most. 

Yes. Totara Skills supports skills assessment that goes beyond self-reported capability or course completion alone. 

Organisations can capture assessor input and verified evidence, track proficiency and achievement, and maintain records of reassessment, expiry and continued proficiency. This is particularly valuable where critical skills need to be demonstrated and evidenced through on-the-job assessments. 

Totara Skills provides leaders with skills and role data to understand current workforce readiness and plan future capability. 

You can identify areas of low skills coverage, assess readiness for critical roles, understand where capability risks exist and use those insights to support workforce and capacity planning. 

This applies at every level – our drill-down reporting enables organisation-wide, region, department, team and individual view levels (in accordance with role-based permissions to view the reports).  

Yes. A skills management platform can help employees understand how their existing capabilities align with future roles and what they need to develop to progress. 

Totara Skills supports clearer skills-based career pathways, helping employees take greater ownership of their development while giving organisations more opportunities to grow capability from within. 

Leaders can use skills data to assess suitability for candidates for a new role, but importantly, they also have data to tell them who is willing and aspires to move to future roles to progress their career. 

Totara Skills helps organisations use skills, proficiency and aspiration data to identify people who may be able to progress towards critical or future roles. 

Leaders can understand how closely employees match role requirements, identify remaining gaps and focus development on improving readiness for future opportunities. 

Managers can use Totara Skills to understand strengths, proficiency and development needs across their teams. 

This gives them practical insight to support better coaching, check-ins, appraisals, goal setting and targeted development conversations, rather than relying only on learning activity or informal observations. 

Totara Skills helps organisations track changes in workforce capability over time, including proficiency, skills-gap reduction, skills coverage, role readiness and time to readiness. 

These insights help L&D and HR teams understand whether development activity is improving capability and provide stronger evidence for learning-impact and investment conversations. 

Yes. Totara Skills can support different skills and competency frameworks, role requirements and organisational groups while maintaining central visibility and governance. 

This allows organisations to reflect different local or functional requirements without losing consistency in areas such as assessment, proficiency standards and workforce reporting. 

Yes. Totara Learn manages the learning people need to complete. Totara Skills adds a clear view of the capabilities people need for their roles, where gaps exist and what development is required next. 

As Totara Skills sits on the same platform as Totara Learn, you can build on the structures, role-specific rules and governance you already have in place. Skills gaps can then be connected directly to targeted development, helping you focus learning where it will have the greatest impact on workforce capability. 

Learning achievements can also contribute to demonstrating proficiency alongside assessor input and on-the-job evidence. Together, Totara Learn and Totara Skills help you move beyond measuring learning activity to understanding whether capability is improving — including proficiency, skills-gap reduction and readiness for key roles.