Invited members now pick their skills while setting up their profile.
Curator companies can now add a skills step to profile creation, so invited members choose from your board's preferred skills as they set up rather than leaving the field blank. Matching runs on real data from a member's first day, and the whole step works comfortably on a phone.
What changed at profile creation
A curated skills catalogue only earns its keep when members actually populate their profiles with it. Until now a new member could finish setting up without recording a single skill, and matching had nothing to work with until they came back and filled it in. The skills step at profile creation closes that gap at the one moment you reliably have a member's attention.
- Curator companies choose whether profile creation includes a skills step.
- Invited members pick from your board's preferred skills rather than typing into an open box.
- Skills are grouped by category, with optional search for anything not listed.
- Choices stay visible as the member works through the step, so nothing gets picked twice.
- Profile creation waits until at least one required skill is selected.
- The whole step works comfortably on a phone.
Custom skills is the catalogue admins curate alongside the standard one, organised into nine categories and with the skill terminology itself renameable to suit the community. The skills step draws from that catalogue, so what a new member sees is your vocabulary rather than a borrowed taxonomy. The catalogue got easier to maintain in the same release too, with search and filtering across your company's skills and an export whenever you want a copy outside Spacewalk, recorded in the custom skills catalogue entry.
What it means for your community
Members get relevant matches immediately rather than after a second visit that, for most people, never happens. Talent matching runs on each member's skills, work preferences and profile against the skills and requirements extracted from every role, so a profile with nothing in it produces nothing worth sending.
Take a skills bootcamp inviting a data cohort onto its board at the end of teaching. Placement rate is the number funders, learners and accreditors judge the programme on, and sourcing live relevant roles for every cohort by hand is constant work that never finishes. With the skills step switched on and the catalogue built around what that cohort was actually taught, every learner finishes onboarding with their stack recorded, so the first match email they get selects rather than broadcasts. The job board for skills bootcamps page covers how that fits the rest of a placement programme.
A professional association has the same problem in a different shape. Members expect tangible career value from membership and a stale or irrelevant jobs page quietly undermines the case for renewing. When members choose from the association's own vocabulary as they join, the roles reaching them look like the profession they are actually in, which decides whether a careers hub under the association's brand is still being opened in month three.
What it means for your team
Chasing incomplete profiles stops being an admin task. The data arrives with the member instead of being requested afterwards, and because the picks come from your curated catalogue rather than free text, you do not inherit a long tail of near-duplicate skills to merge later.
It also makes your notification settings work as intended. Admins already control which skills trigger talent match notification emails, and that control only does anything once members have skills recorded against them. A member who selects three skills on day one is opted into alerts that mean something rather than sitting silently in the pool. If you have not curated the catalogue yet, that is the prerequisite, and building your own skills catalogue is where to start.
Requiring at least one skill is the part worth thinking about before switching it on. It is a small amount of friction, placed at the point where someone is already committed to setting up, which is a much cheaper place to spend it than an email three weeks later asking them to come back and finish. It pairs naturally with inviting a whole community in one action, where the alternative is chasing profile completion across hundreds of people who all joined on the same day.
What happens if a member's skill is not in your catalogue?
The categories show your board's preferred skills and search covers anything not listed there, so a member with an unusual specialism is not stuck staring at a list that does not describe them. That matters most for communities whose members straddle two fields, where the preferred set covers the main path and search handles the edges. Tidying the catalogue later is safe either way, because skills already used on roles and profiles are archived rather than deleted, and archiving can be reversed.
Getting started
Curate the catalogue first, under Manage Company in the Skills area, because the skills step draws from whatever is there. The marketplace admin guide walks through adding and categorising skills, and the knowledge base covers what happens to skills already in use. Spacewalk runs a 14-day free trial with no credit card required, and a board goes live in about an hour.