Core concepts

A few ideas underpin everything in Admire. Once these click, the rest of the platform makes sense.

The building blocks

• Skill — a specific, observable capability someone can develop (e.g. “Runs a one-on-one”). Each skill has a way to assess it and a bar for what counts as mastery. Skills can be organized into trees, with broader skills made up of narrower ones. Skill is Admire’s unit of management — see Skills overview.
• Role — what good looks like for a job. A role is defined by a handful of key skills (typically 4–6) tied to your business goals.
• Person (staff) — a member of your team. People are assigned to roles and teams, and inherit the skills those roles expect.
• Meeting — a coaching or observation session where you watch someone demonstrate skills and record what you saw. (This is the heart of how skill levels get measured.)
• Observation — a single recorded assessment of one skill, captured during a Meeting or on its own.
• Mastery — the point at which someone has reliably demonstrated a skill, based on its score threshold and, optionally, a number of consecutive sessions at that level.

How they fit together

Everything in Admire runs on one loop — Define → Observe → Track:

flowchart LR
  R["Roles<br/><small>define what good looks like</small>"]
  S["Skills<br/><small>expected of each person</small>"]
  M["Meetings and Observations<br/><small>measure where people stand</small>"]
  P["Mastery and Progress<br/><small>growth over time</small>"]

  R -- Define --> S
  S -- Observe --> M
  M -- Track --> P
  P -. coach next .-> R

Roles define the skills that matter. Meetings and observations measure where each person actually stands on those skills. Mastery tracking shows progress over time, so you can see who’s ready for more and where to coach next.

Who’s involved

Most people wear more than one hat — a manager is usually also a staff member with their own role and skills — but it helps to know the three vantage points. (For the underlying access levels, see Users & permissions.)

• Managers & coaches — the primary audience. They define roles and skills, run Meetings to record observations, and track progress with reports.
• Staff (the people being developed) — they see their own skills and progress on their profile, practice with AI self-coaching, and take part in Meetings.
• Admins — they set up the organization: users and permissions, and custom fields & domain types.

Where to go next

• New to the platform? Follow Your first week.
• Ready to bring in AI? See Connect your AI (MCP).