Skills Section - Opportunities/Ideas to increase usefulness and adoption

[oschwaldp-oci]

I'm attempting to capture some ideas here that came out of other discussion as a means to continue and expand the participant pool of the discussion as well as persist some of the ideas.

Thoughts/observations on existing skills input:

• skills are currently input via selection from a long drop-down list
• skills can be added on the fly by a user, which can lead to duplication or confusion about meaning
• skills only have the context of the skill name, and sometimes mean different things to different users

Opportunities/Ideas:

• Would providing a means of categorization or hierarchy to the skills provide meaningful context that makes it easier for users to input their skills? For instance: Instead of having separate skills for Frontend Development, Svelte and React there could be a Frontend Development section with breakout of skills or technologies that fit within?
• Would creating some categorization of specific practice area, technology area, or technical/technology skills that are specifically helpful to curating teams and experience be useful?
• Would it be useful to provide a separate Misc skills category where skills are user definable to not lose the ability to record skills not in the static list, but could be adopted into the static list?
• How can the skill recording process be streamlined for users? Maybe checkboxes of skills in categories?
• Is there an opportunity to provide context to a skill? For instance, Networking -- Is that network programming, creating physical networks, or great at connecting to people at social events?

[oschwaldp-oci]

Could also be great to better differentiate between "skill" and "topical" or "area" experience. For instance, could be great to know that someone is a wizard with C++ but could also be great to know they have experience in the Finance realm applying that skill. Wouldn't necessarily call Finance a skill in this context, but would be great to recognize we have someone with a decade of Finance or DeFi, etc. experience or interest in that area floating around.