Employees (Part Three)

Finally Skills.

This is the heart of the employee game.

Skills are divided into Vocational and Business Skills. These Skills can be levelled up to Level 10 each.

Each employee has a chance to learn a New Vocational Skill each time he/she levels up.

This means that maximally, an employee would learn 1 New Vocational Skill for each level to Level 10, resulting in 10 Vocational Skills - this is extremely rare.

The Vocational Skills are:
1)   Reception
2)   Supervision
3)   Negotiation
4)   Interpersonal
5)   Learning
6)   Bookkeeping
7)   Auditing
8)   Project
9)   Compliment
10) Sales

What are they for? Vocational Skills are used in
1)   Departments
2)   Landmarks
3)   Ship

Often, you will see that filling a certain Position in say a Landmark will require a certain number of Vocational Skills - In this example below, this Memorial Park requires 5 Vocational Skills, shown here circled in red. These icons stand for Supervision, Negotiation, Bookkeeping, Compliment, and Sales. This means the employee hired here will need these 5 skills, no other!

Molly is the first employee at the Memorial Park above and has fulfilled the requirements of all 5 skills and at Level 2 each, shown circled in red.

Often these requirements also have a Level requirement. For example, the second employee at the memorial park will require ALL the five skills to be at Level 3.

As you can see, the ticked employee only has 3 skills, and only 1 of which fits the 5 Skill profile required, and even then, is not high Level enough. Wanda has Level 1 of Bookkeeping, where Level 3 is required. She has none of the other skills required, but does have Reception and Interpersonal skills.

So on and so forth.

So we've spoken about Vocational Skills. What are Business Skills?

There are five Business skills:
1)   Geniality
2)   Compatibility
3)   Positivity
4)   Salesmanship
5)   Creativity

As far as I know, they do not differ from each other at all. But how do employees get them, you ask?

By conversion using tokens. The employee must convert existing Vocational Skills into Business Skills. They can relearn these Vocational Skills by chance when they next level.

The rate of conversion is given below.

Business Change No.	Token Cost
First skill converted	8
Second skill converted	16
Third skill converted	32
Fourth skill converted	64
Fifth skill converted	128

So what do these Business Skills do? They serve only one purpose as far as I know - increasing shop perks as the manager. Each Level in a Business Skill provides 20 + 1% Perk if the employee is the manager.

For example, Pearl Fast, my manager for Fox Cosmetics, has 5 Geniality, 5 Compatibility and 10 Positivity. This equates to 20 Business Skill Levels - this provides 21% * 20 Perk = 400 + 20% Perk.

The extra 3% from the number highlighted in purple comes from 1 of Pearl's Vocational Skill and Two other employees with 1 skill each.

There are other things to know about Skills, for example, the cost of levelling each and Education, but I'll leave that for a later date.

I hope this introduction to Employees gives you a better basic understanding of what to look for in your new hirelings. As usual, I leave discovering the best strategy to hiring/firing/training to you - is it better to hire all Secondary Talents and try to get good employees there, knowing that your wages will be low or is it better to hire International Headhunts to likely shorten the time to get good employees?

Have fun,
ST

Employees (Part Two)

So we've covered Talent and Discernment.

Once hired, you can deploy your employee to different shops as you see fit. You can also invest money and tokens into employees to make them better, that is to help you turn a bigger profit.

The things to take into consideration into this is the concept of Level and Traits.

A new employee starts life at Level 0. Each employee also comes with three attributes, called Traits:
1) Experience
2) Adaptability
3) Loyalty

These start out with values of 12.

Let's discuss these: Levels and Traits.

Levels
------
An employee starts out at Level 0 and reaches maximum at Level 10.

To gain levels, the employee must undergo Cultivation, which is a (tedious) increase in Traits. Once all the three Traits reach a certain Level, the employee can be Upgraded to that Level. Eg. a Level 2 Employee with Level 4 Experience, Level 7 Adaptability, and Level 5 Loyalty can be upgraded to Level 3 and then Level 4.

Trait Level	Points Required to Next Level
Level 1	21
Level 2	36
Level 3	63
Level 4	110
Level 5	192
Level 6	336
Level 7	588
Level 8	1029
Level 9	1800
Level 10	-

The value of adding Levels is an increase in Perks for the shop the employee is hired at. This is measured as 'Professionalism' which has a separate score and then converted into a Perk score.

Employee Level	Professionalism Score	Professionalism Perk
Level 1	8	1.67
Level 2	17	3.33
Level 3	25	5.00
Level 4	33	6.66
Level 5	42	8.33
Level 6	50	10.00
Level 7	58	11.66
Level 8	67	13.33
Level 9	75	14.99
Level 10	83	16.66

Another benefit of Levelling an employee is to try for Skills. This will be discussed in the next section.

There are many ins and outs into determining whether this is a worthwhile endeavour, but there are several points to make here for the junior player:
1) Managers and simple employees have different ways of contribution to shop profit. Levelling a manager is more profitable.
2) Higher 'Talent' employees are more likely to have skills, but become too costly!
3) At an early stage, it is perhaps better to hire 'Primary Talent' or 'Secondary Talent' for the majority of your employees.

Have fun,
ST

Employees (Part One)

Employees form the backbone of your company. They are the ones who sell your goods while you sleep!

This is the first in a short series on employees.

You can hire/fire/tickle employees via the Staffing button in the bottom menu. (Not really, you can't tickle them.) All new employees start at Level 0 and max out at Level 10.

Before you hire them, they have three attributes that you need to consider, two hidden and one not.

These are:
1) Talent
2) Wage
3) Discernment

Talent is divided into 5 groups and will be the main way in which you decide how to hire your employees.

These groups are:
1) Primary Talent
2) Secondary Talent
3) Advanced Talent
4) Super Talent
5) International Headhunt

They are divided into these groups by wage grouping; Primary Talent has wages of 100 - 255; Secondary, 256 - 507; Advanced, 508 - 1142; Super, 1143 - 2570; International, 2571 - 3855.

These groupings are a basic indicator for two things - how likely you are to get different levels of Discernment (which I will explain shortly), and what the highest possible wage you are going to pay for this employee should you train them all the way to Level 10.

Discernment is one of the hidden qualities.

It is divided into 5 categories:
1) Data Collecting
2) Informed
3) Knowledgeable
4) Wise
5) Enlightened

An employee's Discernment, as far as I can tell, affects the chances of getting Skills, which help empower your business via various means. I will explain this in the next instalment. The higher the Discernment, the more likely the employee is going to learn a Skill each level. Enlightened is the highest Discernment, followed by Wise, etc. etc.

You can uncover an employee's discernment by using Aptitude Test or Tryout. This costs 10 Tokens and 30 Gold respectively. I will explain these in the next instalment.

Essentially, hiring an employee from a higher Talent group (i.e. International Headhunt) means you are more likely to get a more Discerning employee (i.e. Enlightened rather than Informed) - General Vezax from my guild calculates this at about 2% for Enlightened from International Headhunt.

Note however, this does not guarantee your employee will have more skills - just a higher chance of getting skills on levelling.

What it does mean though is that to increase your chance of getting multi-skilled employees, you are likely to higher more 'Talented' employees, which will increase your base wages. Whether this is worth doing is debatable at different Company levels.

Have fun,
ST

I see the Light!

As you probably know, employees have different 'Discernment' that is their ability to learn new skills with each level gained.

This ranges from Data Collecting - Informed - Knowledgeable - Wise - Enlightened.

I know not the exact chances for each strata, but I got my first Enlightened employee!

Whoo!

The best part about her is only 88k wages!

Have fun,
ST