Skills terminology

- There's a lot of debate around terms like skills, competencies, and capabilities. At my company, we work with a number of different organizations and each one of them has their own unique and usually passionate perspective on what is defined as a skill. Often it comes down to how detailed and granular they want to analyze skills. Rather than trying to appease all different viewpoints for the purpose of this course, a skill is the learned abilities to perform a task. In conjunction with this, a competency is a bit broader. It's a collection of the skills and knowledge and behaviors to perform a task. Should you disagree, we can talk about that in the comments section. No matter how you are slicing and dicing skills, there are four other terms you should be familiar with when it comes to building an upskilling strategy. These are skills inventory, taxonomy, ontology, and a skills-based organization. A skills inventory is a list of all of the skills within your company. Again, this will depend on how you decide to categorize a skill, but in general the inventory is a comprehensive list of all the skills for each employee whether the skill is relevant to the work or not. A skills taxonomy is an ultimate list of skills your organization needs to get work done. Some companies may opt to develop their own taxonomies specific to their industry. This is because off-the-shelf taxonomies may be too broad, ranging from A to Z, aviation to zoology. Generally speaking, a skills taxonomy will be sorted into hierarchies and skill clusters or groups. This is different from the inventory because it is only analyzing the skills needed by the company. A skills ontology is an organization of groups of skills and their relationship to each other. It's a more complex form of indexing, whereas the taxonomy is a hierarchy. In an ontology you can see everywhere a certain skill is required across say roles or geographies and what might be adjacent skills. Finally a skills-based organization is when work and the workforce is structured not just in terms of roles, but by skills. Instead of static job positions, people are deployed against tasks based on their skillset. Many companies are moving towards a skills-based organization model. A good suggestion is to speak to some of the leaders in HR or L&D to find out if this is part of their planning. If you are thinking about an upskilling strategy, this is important to know. Now that we've settled on some common language and some of the ways to organize skills data, let's look at how skills can be transferrable.