Can I specify employee competencies or skills in Jira?

[Hennie Bink]

Can I specify employee competencies or skills in Jira? When assigning issues, I only want to assign the issue to an employee who is qualified or suitable for it.

[Mary from Planyway]

Hi @Hennie Bink 

It's Mary from Planyway for Jira: workload, time tracking, roadmapping

In Jira, while there's not a built-in feature specifically designed for tracking employee competencies or skills directly, you can achieve this goal through a combination of custom fields, labels, and Jira's powerful querying and automation capabilities. Here are some strategies you could use to manage and assign issues based on employee competencies or skills:

1. Custom Fields for User Profiles

• Create custom fields for user profiles to capture employee skills or competencies. This could be done through a multi-select custom field that lists various skills or qualifications. However, this approach requires manual maintenance and updates to user profiles.

2. Labels or Components

• Use labels or components to tag issues with specific skill requirements. When creating or editing issues, you can add labels or assign components that represent the skills needed to resolve the issue.

3. Jira Query Language (JQL) and Dashboards

• Utilize Jira Query Language (JQL) to filter issues based on the required skills (using labels or components) and then match those with employees who have those skills (assuming you have a way to track this, like custom fields on user profiles or a separate skills database).
• Create dashboards that display issues filtered by specific skills or competencies, making it easier for project managers or team leads to assign tasks to the right employees.

4. Automation

• Implement Jira's automation rules to automatically assign issues to users based on their skills. This can be complex and might require custom fields for tracking skills on user profiles or using an external database that can be queried by the automation rule to find suitable assignees.

5. Jira Apps and Marketplace Solutions

• Explore Jira Marketplace for apps that might offer functionality closer to skill-based issue assignment. There are numerous plugins for resource management and enhanced user profiles that could provide the functionality you're looking for.

[Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_]

Hi @Hennie Bink and welcome to the Community!

No, you can't manage Skills for Jira users.

You could sort them into Groups and add Workflow Validators or Automation rules to ensure the Issue is assigned to a User from a specific group. I am not too sure on how practical that would be though.

On a project level, people should be able to know who can work on an issue as it's usually one team?