Workforce settings

Skills and what authorises them, certifications, shifts, worker types and training courses.

Skills

What a person can do. Skills are used by:

• Maintenance plans, to say what a round requires.
• Routing, to rank who could do a job.
• Dispatch, to warn before you send somebody who cannot do it.
• The skills matrix, to find where you have only one person.

Keep the list at the level work is actually described. “Mechanical” is too coarse to route on; “replacing a mechanical seal on a centrifugal pump” is too fine to maintain.

Skill categories

Group skills — mechanical, electrical, instrumentation, welding, civil — so a long list stays navigable.

Certifications

Formal tickets with expiry dates.

The difference from a skill matters: a skill is a capability, a certification is an authorisation that stops being valid on a date. An expired certification stops an assignment rather than warning about it, and expiry raises a notification ahead of time.

Certification types

The kinds you track — pressure systems, electrical isolation, confined space, working at height — each with its usual validity period, so entering somebody’s certificate fills the expiry in.

Shift definitions

The patterns your plant works: a day shift, a night shift, a rotating pattern. Shifts decide who is available when, which is what capacity weighs and what dispatch reads.

Availability comes from shifts, working windows and leave together, with one place owning the precedence between them. Get the shift definitions right and everything downstream follows.

Worker types

Employee, contractor, apprentice, agency. Types can carry different rates and different rules about what work they may be given.

Training courses

Courses that lead to a skill or a certification. Useful when the skills matrix shows a row with one mark in it and you need to do something about it.