Skills assigned to a role are automatically inherited by all sub-roles. Understanding this mechanism is essential to correctly structure the role coding and get accurate results when managing employee skills.

How inheritance works

When you assign a skill to a role, all child roles of that role automatically inherit it.

Inherited skills:

• appear in the child role’s skill list, marked as inherited
• cannot be removed from the child role — to remove them you must remove them from the parent role they originate from

How to structure the role hierarchy

To use inheritance correctly, the role structure must not mirror the position hierarchy in the org chart (manager → direct reports). It should instead be organised by functional area.

The recommended approach is:

• at the parent level: the area macro-role (e.g. Marketing, Development, Administration)
• at the child level: the specific roles within that area, all at the same hierarchical level as each other

Practical example

Taking the Marketing area as an example:

• Marketing (parent role): receives the skills common to all profiles in the area, for example knowledge of marketing tools or data analysis capabilities
• Marketing Leader (child role): receives the skills specific to that profile, for example budget management or team coordination
• Marketing Operator (child role): receives the technical skills specific to that role, for example campaign management or SEO

In this way, both the Leader and the Operator inherit the baseline Marketing skills; each then adds the skills specific to their own role, without interfering with the other.

Why not use the position structure

In the position hierarchy, a Marketing Manager may be defined as the direct superior of their team members. If this structure were replicated in the role coding, the manager’s managerial skills would automatically be inherited by the team members — with incorrect results that cannot be overridden at the child role level.

By structuring roles by area instead, the Manager and team members sit at the same hierarchical level (both children of the same area node), and each role’s skills remain separate and independent.