Skills in the schedule

Skills describe what each employee can do: Kitchen, Bar, Till, Floor, Reception, Cleaning, etc. By using them in the schedule, you no longer simply place "someone" on a slot: you place the right person, with the right qualification, in the right position. It's a simple tool that makes the schedule more readable, fairer and more reliable.

What skills are for

• Schedule the right profile in the right position: a shift can require one or more skills; you immediately see who is qualified.
• Read the schedule at a glance: each skill has its own colour, which lets you visually spot how positions are spread across the week.
• Refine costs: a skill can carry its own hourly cost (employee and employer). A shift's cost then reflects the position actually held, and not just a single cost per person.
• Secure qualification requirements: in some trades, holding a position requires a specific qualification. Skills serve as a marker so you don't schedule someone in a position they can't hold.
• Guide automatic generation: if you use AI schedule generation, Shyfter can take skills into account, or even assign only the people who hold all the required skills (the "strict skills" option).

Create and assign a skill

Skills are created in Settings ⚙️ → Skills (name, colour, and optionally an employee and employer cost per hour). You then assign them to your employees, based on what each one can do, and you indicate them on the shifts that require them, when creating or editing a shift.

Who sees which skills: access levels

The visibility of skills depends on the user's role:

• An administrator sees all the skills on the account, whether they are attached to them or not.
• A schedule or HR manager only sees the skills assigned to them (their scope). They thus work only with the positions that concern them, without being flooded by those of other teams.

Keep this in mind when assigning roles: for a manager to be able to schedule a position, the corresponding skill must be part of their scope.

Filter the schedule by skill

In Schedules → Schedule management, the filter bar lets you display only the shifts of one or more skills. This is handy for focusing on a specific position (for example seeing only the Kitchen) without being distracted by the rest of the schedule. The skill filter acts within what your role already allows you to see.

Display and organise the schedule by skill

Beyond the filter, you can organise how the schedule is read by skill: sort or group the rows by skill to see, position by position, who is scheduled. You can save this configuration as a view (for example "Kitchen, week") and return to it in one click: the view remembers the selected skills and the display mode. When printing the schedule, a sort by skills is also available, along with an option to make skills appear on the document.

Skills and automatic generation

If you generate your schedules with AI, two settings come into play (in the generation settings):

• Use skills: generation takes employees' skills into account.
• Strict skills: only employees who hold all the skills required by a shift can be assigned to it.

Best practices

• Keep a clear and not too long list of skills: a few well-defined positions are better than dozens of overlapping skills.
• Keep assignments up to date: a skill properly filled in on each employee makes filtering, replacement suggestions and automatic generation far more relevant.
• Use colours to reflect your real organisation (one colour per zone or per type of position), so the schedule reads instantly.