Skill Inventory Overview

Skills can be anything you want them to be, and you have up to 10,000 that you can create and track for your volunteers. For example, some organizations use it for specific facility and maintenance skills, so if they have an electrical problem at one of their facilities, they can search and find volunteers who can help fix their electrical problem. Some organizations add Skills like Office Administration, Fundraiser, Grant Writer, Accountant, Lawyer, Nurse, Dentist, etc. It is important to keep in mind that although you may have no need for this data now, you may need it later. If volunteers are consistently adding their Skills to their volunteer profile, and then there becomes an urgent need for 10 nurses to provide volunteer care or for a dentist to care for a family in need, now you can quickly pull a list of all of your qualified volunteers and easily get in touch with them.

As volunteers create their profile they can select their own Skills, or they can be added to a volunteer’s profile by someone with Administrator, Leadership Team, or Group Leader access. You also have the option in the System Configuration to break down the volunteers’ Skills by experience levels: "Professional - Licensed/Certified", "Amateur" or "Unskilled - but would like to learn."

Since every one of our customers is different, CERVIS is not pre-populated with Skills. This allows you to add the specific Skills that are most relevant to your organization. To help you get started, we’ve attached a document to this article (see “Skills Listing” link below) that lists many of the most used Skills. Please feel free to use these or come up with your own.

When adding a new Skill in CERVIS, you will give it a 4-digit number that can be used for sorting, which we refer to as the Skill Code. In the System Configuration, you can set how volunteers will view the list of Skills - either alphabetically or numerically by Skill Code. For organizations that choose to sort by the Code, many group their Skills by number. For example, the 1000s represent facility and maintenance skills, the 2000s represent professional skills, the 3000s are languages, etc.

A common question is “What is the difference between Interest Categories and Skills?” For most organizations, their Interest Categories are broad and their Skills are extremely specific. Additionally, a volunteer may have skills that do not match up with your Interest Categories, but because you track and know their skills, you can develop new programs based on your volunteers' skills or find the best fit for them in the programs that you currently have.

For information about how to add, update, or view the skills inventory follow the link HERE.