Assign Skills
Skills decide what work reaches a technician. Getting them right is the difference between a balanced day and one person carrying the shop.
Who can do this: Location Managers, Org Admins and Account Owners.
Assigning skills
Open the technician
Tick the skills they hold
The standard list covers general work — Master Technician, Diagnostics, General, Oil & Lube, Tires, A/C Service, Electrical, EV Certified — and body and paint work: Denting, Painting, Body Estimating, Frame Straightening, Surface Prep, Spray Painting, Body Assembly, ADAS Technician.
Each skill covers work up to a level of complexity.
Write skill notes
Free text for what the list cannot hold: the makes they know, the diagnostic work they are trusted with, the equipment they are strongest on.
Save
Suggesting skills from a description
On plans with AI-assisted features, describe the technician in a sentence and have their skills suggested.
Type a description
“Senior EV and diagnostics specialist” · “Body shop technician, ten years, mostly panel and prep work”.
Choose Suggest skills
Review before saving
The suggestion is a starting point.
If nothing can be inferred, the form says so and asks for more detail or a manual selection.
The mistake worth avoiding
The commonest configuration fault in BayWise is recording a skill against one strong technician and not against the colleagues who also hold it. You have told BayWise that only one person can do that work, and you will get exactly the overloaded, fragile plan that implies — plus a day of unplaceable vehicles every time that person is off.
When a plan repeatedly overloads one person, check the skills of everybody around them before you check anything else.
Sharma Motors, Mumbai had diagnostics recorded against one senior technician. Diagnostic jobs queued behind him daily, and the two Wednesdays a month he was on a course produced a handful of unplaceable vehicles every time. Two colleagues were already doing diagnostic work; recording it against them took five minutes and the queue disappeared.
Skills versus certifications
| Answers | Expires | |
|---|---|---|
| Skill | Is this person able to do this work? | No |
| Certification | Is this person formally qualified, and currently in date? | Yes |
Safety-gated work needs both. Recording EV as a skill does not qualify somebody for high-voltage work — that needs the certification, and a current one.
Writing useful skill notes
Skill notes are read where the structured skills do not settle the matter on their own — which tends to be exactly the ambiguous, high-value work you would want assigned thoughtfully.
Worth writing:
- Marques or vehicle types they know well
- Diagnostic or specialist work they are trusted with
- Equipment they are strongest on
- Work they should not be given, and why
Not worth writing: their shift pattern, their rate, or their attitude. The first two are fields; the third does not belong in a system.
Common questions
How many skills should one person have? As many as they genuinely hold. Under-recording creates bottlenecks; over-recording sends people work they cannot do well.
We need a skill that is not on the list. Add one. Keep it sparing — a skill only one person holds, needed by only one kind of job, is a bottleneck you have written into the plan.
Does a skill covering heavy work also cover light work? Yes. A technician with Diagnostics can take a light diagnostic job. ADAS Technician is the exception — it covers specialist work only.
Somebody is learning a skill. Do not record it until they can be given the work unsupervised. Supervision is a separate flag on the work, not a half-recorded skill.
Does the efficiency rating interact with skills? They are separate. Skills decide whether work reaches them; efficiency affects how long that work is expected to take.