Pathways, skills, and certifications

ForLearnersManagersAdmins

A pathway is the training plan that your organization gives to a learner. This page tells how its steps, skill scores, and certifications work together, and how Arcade counts progress. Use it to make pathways that learners can complete, and to read their progress correctly.

The steps of a pathway

A pathway is a sequence of steps. In Manage, a step has the name “interaction”. Each step has one type:

Step	What the learner does	Changes skill scores
Lesson	Reads cards and answers quizzes.	No
AI Training	Learns from an AI coach.	Yes
AI Roleplay	Talks with an AI that plays a customer.	Yes
Live Practice	Joins a queue, and Arcade finds a partner for the session.	No
Coaching	Talks with a coach, who starts the session on the Coach tab.	Yes, for the learner and the coach
Certification	Answers questions that an AI reviewer grades.	No

Learners do the steps in order. On the pathway card, only the first step that is not complete is open.

Learners see only the published steps. A draft step does not show and does not count. Coaching steps do not show on the Train tab, because the coach starts the session. A pathway with only coaching steps does not show there.

How steps connect to skills

You do not add skills to each step. Arcade uses AI to find the skills of your skill library that the pathway trains. These matched skills are the skill focus. In the Skill focus section, the AI also shows skills that the pathway trains but your library does not have. Select Create skill on one of them to add it to your library and to the matched skills. Arcade updates the skill focus some minutes after you add or change steps.

After an AI Training, an AI Roleplay, or a coaching session in the pathway, the AI rates each skill of the skill focus. When the pathway has no matched skills, the AI uses the active skills that apply to the role of the learner. A skill that the session gave no chance to show gets no rating.

How a skill score changes

A skill score is a number from 1 to 100. The tier of the skill, for example Beginner or Master, comes from the score.

By default, a skill gets its first score after three ratings. The first score is the average of these ratings.
After that, each new rating can move the score toward the level that the learner showed. By default, one session moves a score by a maximum of 15 points.

To learn how the AI grades a session, refer to How AI scoring works.

What a certification proves

A certification proves that a learner can answer its questions to the standard that you set. Each prompt card is one question. The AI reviewer gives each answer a pass or a fail.

The learner passes when they pass the number of questions in Pass Criteria in one attempt. The other grades of the session do not change the result.
A passed certification shows on the profile of the learner.
A certification does not change skill scores.

After a fail, the learner can try again when the Cooldown Period is over. You set this number of days on the certification. Each new attempt asks all the questions again. After a pass, the learner cannot start the certification again.

Prerequisites

A pathway can have one Prerequisite pathway. Until the prerequisite shows COMPLETED for the learner, the pathway shows UPCOMING with a lock, and the learner cannot open it.

How Arcade counts progress and completion

A step is complete when Arcade approves a session of it. An AI Training or AI Roleplay session gets approval when the learner takes part, stays on the topic, and reaches the end of the content. A certification session gets approval when the learner passes. A manager can also approve a session, or remove the approval, in the session details.

A pathway is complete when all of its published steps are complete. The reports for managers and the games that a pathway unlocks use this rule. They count the coaching steps too.

The pathway card on the Train tab does not count coaching steps. Its progress, for example 2 / 5, counts only the steps that the learner can start. For this reason, the card of a pathway with a coaching step can show COMPLETED, while your report shows that the pathway is not complete.

Good to know

The step order applies on the pathway card. The search on the Train tab also finds later steps, and a learner can start them from the search results.
When you publish a new step in a pathway, learners who completed the pathway must also do the new step. Until then, the pathway is in progress again.
A change to a step does not remove a completion that a learner already has.
Assign the prerequisite pathway to the same learners. Arcade looks for the prerequisite only in the pathways of the learner, so without it the pathway stays locked.
When a pathway has matched skills, its sessions rate those skills for all learners. The roles that you set on a skill do not apply.
An attempt that the learner did not finish, or that Arcade could not assess, does not start the cooldown period.