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Routing work items to agents based on skills › Using Skills Management › Skills Management › Manage people and work capabilities › Extend ServiceNow AI Platform capabilities
Release: Australia · Updated: 2026-03-12 · Official documentation · View source

Create Skill Determination rules to assign skills to work items

Create Skill Determination rules to identify skills required by agents to work on work items and automatically associate them to those work items.

Before you begin

Role required: skill_admin or admin

About this task

You can automatically add a skill to a case based on the product associated with the case if you enable the Product to Skill mapping table (Skill Required for Model Maintenance [cmn_m2m_skill_model]).

A skill determination rule is created for every new skill required for a work item.

  • If a skill is no longer required for a work item, deactivate or remove the rule applied for the work item.
  • If two rules have the same skill associated with one work item and one rule evaluates the skill as mandatory and the other rule evaluates it as optional, then the rule that evaluates the skill as mandatory is always used.

The table describes the types of Skill Determination rules you could create.

Rule TypeDescription
SimpleAdds skills to work items based on a set of conditions used to evaluate the source table.
LookupAdds skills to work items based on selections from two different tables connected using one or more reference fields.
AdvancedAdds skills to work items using a script.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to All > Skills > Skill Determination Rules.

  2. Click New.

  3. In the Name field, enter a name for the rule.

  4. Select the Active check box to enable the rule to assign skills to work items.

  5. From the Source table drop-down menu, select the work item source table for this rule.

  6. Using the condition builder, select the conditions to evaluate the work item.

  7. Create the rule.

Rule typeSteps
Create a simple rule
  1. From the Type drop-down menu, select Simple.
  2. In the Skills table, add each skill required for the selected work item.
  3. If a skill is optional for selected work item, in the Mandatory field, select False.
  4. In the Skill Level field, add a level for the skill. You must configure the form to display this field.

For information about defining skill levels, see Define a skill level type.

Create a lookup rule
  1. From the Type drop-down menu, select Lookup.
  2. From the Lookup table drop-down menu, select the reference table to connect to the source table.

The Skills Field that connects the source and reference tables is automatically populated.

  1. If this skill is mandatory, select the Mandatory check box.
  2. From the Skill Level Field drop-down menu, select a level for this skill.
  3. Click Save.
  4. In the Field Mappings related list, click New.
  5. From the Source table field drop-down menu, select an attribute to map to the reference table.
  6. From the Lookup table field drop-down menu, select an attribute to map to the source table.
Create an advanced rule
  1. From the Type drop-down menu, select Advanced.
  2. In the Script window, enter a script.
  1. Click Submit.

Parent Topic:Routing work items to agents based on skills