Expertise Discovery

Your volunteers bring professional skills, creative talents, and life experience to church every Sunday — but most churches have no way to discover or organize that information. The Expertise page changes that.

Where Expertise Data Comes From

Scout builds expertise profiles from multiple sources:

Job title — When volunteers enter their job title, Scout’s AI categorizes it into professional domains (Healthcare, Education, Finance, Technology, etc.). If a volunteer marks their job as current, it gets a “Current” badge.
Self-selected skills — During profile setup, volunteers pick skills from categorized lists. These are split into professional skills and personal skills.
Free-text details — Volunteers can add descriptions to their professional entries for more context beyond the skill name.

The Expertise Page

The Expertise page organizes your team’s skills into a two-level hierarchy. At the top level, you’ll see parent groups like:

Professional Services
Healthcare & Education
Creative & Arts
Technology
Trades & Skilled Labor
Leadership & Ministry
Other

Each parent group contains specific sub-categories as cards, showing how many volunteers have that expertise. Click into any sub-category to see the specific volunteers and their skills in a slide-out detail panel.

Expertise page — two-level category hierarchy with volunteer counts

Recently Discovered Expertise

At the top of the page, you’ll see a section highlighting volunteers who joined in the last two weeks and have expertise profiles. This helps you spot new talent as it comes in, without having to search for it.

Willingness Tracking

Having a skill and being willing to use it at church are two different things. During profile setup, volunteers indicate their willingness:

“Yes, I’d love to” — Open and eager
“Maybe, depending on the ask” — Open but cautious
“No, prefers to keep these personal” — Not interested in using this skill at church

Volunteers also have a separate role fit preference that captures whether they’re open to using their professional skills in a ministry context at all. Scout tracks both so you can filter for people who are both capable and interested.

Volunteer Detail

Click on any volunteer from the expertise view to see their full profile. The detail modal includes:

Professional and personal expertise with skill tags
Willingness and role fit preferences
AI-generated feedback summary
Engagement and health scores with sentiment chart
Badges earned
Team assignments and follow-up history

Volunteer expertise detail — skills, willingness, scores, and feedback summary

Practical Uses

Filling a specific need — Need someone to help with your church website? Look at the Technology group. Starting a financial counseling ministry? Check Professional Services.
Team building — See what skills exist across your congregation. You might discover that your hospitality team has three graphic designers who’d love to help with creative projects.
Strategic planning — Understanding the collective expertise of your congregation helps you decide which new ministries or initiatives are actually feasible.