This article discusses career paths in QA. Career paths are a Skills Readiness Solution feature and are available in enterprise accounts. Administrators and team managers can create career paths.

This document contains the following sections:

• What Are Career Paths
• How to Create a Career Path

What Are Career Paths

A career path is a representation of how a team member progresses through their career at your company. It contains one or more job roles for team members to move through as they develop, as well as a list of the skills team members in that career path need.

When you open a career path, you see a matrix of:

• The job roles in the order you expect a person to progress through them. 
• The smart skills that are essential for team members on this career path.
  Note: Technically you can add skills other than smart skills to a career path, but we recommend you use smart skills to get the benefit of automated tools to let learner skip training over subjects they already know. Learn more in the Smart Skills article.

At each point in the matrix, you see a number of stars, zero through three. The stars indicate how well the team member with this job role should score on that smart skill:

• 0 stars: This skill is not applicable to this job role
• 1 star: A member with this job role should have basic level ability in this skill
• 2 stars: A member with this job role should have intermediate-level ability in this skill
• 3 stars: A member with this job role should have advanced level ability in this skill

You use the career paths together with programs to automate training. Within each job role, you can assign:

• Skills-based training programs: This type of program assigns training about the smart skills to team members with this job role, at the difficulty level appropriate to each team member. 
• Content-based training programs: This type of program assigns the content you choose to each team member with the job role. The level of difficulty is the same for all team members. 

How to Create a Career Path

Use the following steps to create a career path.

1. From the dashboard, click the building icon from the top toolbar.
   The enterprise menu appears.
   
2. Click Careers from the menu and then click Career paths.
   The Career Paths screen appears.
   
3. Click the Create a career path button in the upper-right corner.
   The Start creating a career path screen appears. 
   
4. Hover over a career path and click Use template. Tip: Click on each career path for a preview before you choose the one you want to start with.
   Important: You can also choose New career path instead of customizing an existing path. However, if possible, you should choose a career path to customize, especially if this is your first career path. The career paths on this list use smart skills that already have curated training available.
   The Create a career path screen appears.
   
   
5. Complete the screen with the information for your career path:
   • Customize the Name and Description for this career path, if desired.
   • Add smart skills to the list by clicking Select or create a skill. You can scroll through the list of smart skills or start typing to search. If you enter a skill name that doesn't appear on the list, the platform considers it a custom skill and adds it to the list without the QA icon.
     Note: Custom skills cannot be measured with smart assessments or trained with programs. We recommend using smart skills whenever possible to get the most out of the skills readiness platform. See Smart Skills for more information.
   • Customize the names of the Job Roles, if desired. You can add job roles by clicking Add job role. If the job role you want does not appear in the list, type the job role name you want and click Create "<name>".
   • Customize the number of stars a member needs in each skill for each job role. You can choose 0, 1, 2, or 3 stars.
6. Click Save.