Make current_skills a many-to-many with a new skills table

[fyliu]

Overview

Suggestion from a PR review. The suggestion is to make the user table's current_skills into a many to many relationship to a skills table that contain all the skills.

Action Items

• discussion
• decision and reasoning
• add a decision record

Discussion Items

• current design
• proposed design
• advantages/disadvantages

Resources/Instructions

• original comment

255 characters doesn't seem like enough space. My inclination is to make this a many to many to make it easier to locate people with specific skills. The only problem is it may be tough to come up with the list of skills. If you are not going to take the current and target skills and make them a mapping to a skills table, then I suggest you make this (and target_skills) into a TextField so you don't have to worry about its length.

Originally posted by @cnk in #83 (comment)

• current design
  • free-form text entry. Supports prose as well as keywords
• many to many with skills table
  • allows fast searching based on skills
  • cleaner design
  • force keyword entry

[ExperimentsInHonesty]

@fyliu Please add this to a discussion agenda with Nicole and I

[ExperimentsInHonesty]

Rethinking the skills model

See Skills and experience matrix example

The intention is to

• On intake
  • gather baseline of where they are skill wise (vrms)
  • find out what they want to get experience with (vrms)
  • match them appropriate projects (civic tech jobs)
• Ongoing
  • ask them if they have gotten exposure to specific skills and get updates
  • be able to show their growth over the course of hfla engagement
  • ask them if they want to share their portfolio items
• After they have left
  • offer opportunities to return to fill in skill set gaps

[ExperimentsInHonesty]

additional use: as they add new skills, new opportunities become available and we will notify them in the app, that they unlocked an new opportunity.

We are definitely making a skills table.

[ExperimentsInHonesty]

I'll be meeting with Salima and Karen on 2023-03-09 at 1:00 PM pst to discuss Skills and experience matrix example

[ExperimentsInHonesty]

• The needs to be rewritten to reflect the ER: Skill matrix that support role and users tables #142

[PlantGirlCodes]

Leaving in New Issues to wait for input from @ExperimentsInHonesty and Database team for this and #142

[ExperimentsInHonesty]

@Neecolaa will make two issues to

• update the user table current_skills
• check if skill table needs updates Create Table: skills (formerly role) 😄  #38

[Neecolaa]

From ER:

Potential solutions [draft]
We are going to need a skills table with rows for each user
three more tables:

skills list (name of skill, roles associated with, id)
competency level
(1 (no experience) 2 (exposure) 3 (some experience) 4 (experience) 5 (portfolio item))
table that joins the many users to their many skills