Question Bank
The Question Bank (/question-bank in the authenticated app) is Skilladder’s shared library of assessment items: vetted, tagged questions that can be reused when building live assessments. It sits next to Skills and Assessments in the product philosophy: skills content (what we measure) stays consistent, while assessments (how you assemble and deliver a test) stay flexible.
Why a question bank exists
| Rationale | Plain language |
|---|---|
| Quality & consistency | The same skill should be tested with questions that meet the same bar, use the same taxonomy labels, and align to job families and levels—instead of each author inventing wording from scratch every time. |
| Governance | Items move through draft → review → live (and can be flagged or retired) so Product, psychometrics, or content teams can control what is “in circulation.” |
| Reuse & speed | Authors can pull from the bank into an assessment instead of retyping; usage is tracked so you can see what is actually deployed. |
| Analytics | The Usage Dashboard helps answer “where are unvalidated or flagged items concentrated?” (e.g. by job family or difficulty level) so remediation is targeted. |
:::info Not the same as “writing a one-off question inside an assessment”
You can still add or edit questions inside a specific assessment where the product allows—but the bank is the catalogue intended for shared, maintained content. Items taken from the bank keep a link back to the catalogue for traceability (question bank id in engineering terms).
:::
Who can see what (internal summary)
There are two different ideas: opening the Question Bank page vs operating it like a content admin.
| Persona | Typical access |
|---|---|
| Platform admin | Full access; can create / edit / delete / import / review / bulk status / retire items and use Review Queue and Usage Dashboard as operators. |
| Directory admin (“Content admin”) | Same operator abilities as Platform for the bank (curate global content). |
| Multi‑company admin (MCA) | Can open the bank for portfolio work (discovery, alignment); operator editing is reserved for Platform / Directory (aligned with “content quality is centralised”). |
| Company primary admin | Can open the bank; pulling items into assessments is part of normal assessment building when permitted. |
| Company staff | Sees the menu only if Question bank (browse) is turned on for that person in Team permissions (canManageQuestionBank in engineering naming—labelled in UI as browsing the bank route). They do not get operator tools unless your product policy changes. |
| Staff viewer | Can open the bank in a read-oriented way (useful for auditors or partners who must not edit content). |
| Talent / candidate | Never see the Question Bank—participants only take assessments, they do not curate them. |
:::tip Customer conversations
If someone asks “why can’t every HR coordinator edit the bank?” — the answer is governance: publishing and lifecycle are meant to be central so reporting, fairness, and versioning stay under control. Delegation for company staff is deliberately browse (assembly) rather than publish unless they are in a Directory/Platform role.
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Tabs you will see on the page
When you have access, the main areas are:
| Tab | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Question List | Search, filter (job family, variant group, status, skill type, format, level, tools, role, source, etc.), paginated table, bulk actions where role allows, CSV import for operators. |
| Review Queue | Items waiting for a review decision (operators work through quality checks). |
| Usage Dashboard | Breakdowns such as live unvalidated and flagged counts by job family and level—operational visibility, not participant-facing. |
Exact filter names and columns can evolve; trust the live UI for demos.
Status labels (what they mean for teammates)
These values drive whether an item is safe to expose in high-stakes contexts:
| Status | Plain language |
|---|---|
| Draft | Work in progress—not ready for review or live use in the formal sense. |
| Review | Submitted for scrutiny; expect it in the Review Queue for operators. |
| Live (unvalidated) | In use or promotable for pilot contexts but not yet through full validation—Usage Dashboard highlights concentration risk. |
| Live (validated) | Passed the review bar you have defined operationally—strongest default for “gold standard” content. |
| Flagged | Marked for attention (automation or workflow may set this); should be triaged rather than ignored. |
| Retired | No longer recommended for new assemblies; historical assessments may still reference old copies depending on product behaviour. |
“Flagged” in the edit modal is normally not a status people set casually by hand—it reflects operational signals in the system.
Formats & tagging (high level)
Questions are classified in ways that tie to skills, roles, job families, levels (e.g. difficulty tiers), format (multiple choice, scenario, short answer, open-ended-style labels in the product), and source lineage (where the content came from—internal, employer engagement programmes, job-description corpora, etc.). This is what makes filters and usage rollups meaningful.
You do not need to memorise enums for customer calls—use the Filters panel language on screen.
Link to assessments
Inside Assessment authoring, authors with the right permissions can open a question bank drawer / flow to insert catalogue items into that assessment. Usage may be recorded for the bank so Reporting and the Usage Dashboard stay honest about where items travelled.
For a map of the rest of the sidebar, see Navigation map (sidebar).