Part of my work at Ibbaka is to investigate 'critical skills.'
What are critical skills? Any question about skills needs to begin with context. We use three approaches to identifying critical skills and framing them.
- Surveys and literature reviews: we run occasional surveys on skills generally and in specific domains such as pricing and customer value management or innovation or design thinking/ We complement this primary research with literature reviews. There is a lot of work going on in this area, largely led by government organizations like the World Economic Forum (WEF), the OECD (Organization for Economic Development) and various national organizations. Professional societies also work on skills or bodies of knowledge for their own purposes. The next Ibbaka survey on critical skills will be ready in October.
- Resilience - Adaptation - Effectiveness. Ibbaka has a model for organizational behavior based on a cycle between resilience, adaptation and effectiveness and the relative importance of different skills at each phase. Resilience is the ability of an organization to withstand shocks (like a global pandemic) and flex back. Adaptation is the ability to change and respond to or shape a new environment. Effectiveness is the perfection of an operating model for a stable environment (stable environments include some level of expected change). The critical skills for an organization change as organizations move through this cycle. Quantifying this is an important part of our current research.
- The skill graph and centrality. The current best practice is to organize skills and related constructs as graphs. Ibbaka organizes its own data as a graph. Doing so makes it easier to find relationships between skills, people and performance. Beyond that, one can use ideas from graph theory to define critical skills. Centrality is one example. See Network centrality and shared skills. The focus there is on the importance of how skills are shared between people but the concepts apply to critical skills. In many cases, critical skills are the ones that connect people to each other or that act as connecting skills.
In this work we use a snipped of the skill graph to put skills in the context of other skills.
To understand a critical skill in context, it helps to understand the supporting and mediating skills and the application domains.
Supporting skills: these are the skills that help to develop the critical skill. It is extremely difficult to develop a new skill from a blank slate.
Mediating skills: often one needs to apply other skills together with the critical skill. For example, Design Thinking requires Empathy. ( Is Empathy a skill? See the article Critical Skills - Empathy.)
Application Domains: these are the areas in which the critical skill is most likely to be applied. Not every skill is relevant to all domains, and understanding where and how a skill is applied is part of understanding, and having, the skill.
For some older thoughts on a related theme see Skill management or talent management?
Project Management and Customer Engagement | Open to Work
2 年I love this article! I’m late to reading it, but it speaks to the iterative process of self-evaluation that I have been navigating as a career transition job seeker trying to articulate my experience and skills and how they translate between contexts. Thank you!
Competency Assurance and TVET Consultant
3 年Dear Steven In Industry we define Critical Skills as follows: All competencies must be demonstrated in accordance with the Health, Safety and Environmental Protection HSEP or Occupational Health and Safety OHS Policy (Industrial Safety Policy) applied by the different sectors of industry and for each work location, where site / operation specific HSEP / OHS -critical activities occur. The HSEP / OHS -Critical Tasks or simply called Critical Tasks are defined as the tasks including key accountability for activities where incompetent actions by an individual could lead to serious injury, illness and fatality to individuals or significant loss and major damage either to the assets or the environment. On the other hand, the terms Skills and Competencies are used, virtually, interchangeably.?In fact there is a difference between Skills and Competencies. The competency is a group of related awareness, knowledge, skills and attitudes / personal behaviors that enable a person (or an organization) to act effectively in a job or situation. Accordingly the competencies may incorporate a skill, but are MORE than the skill; they include behaviors, as well as knowledge that are fundamental to the use of a skill. Best regards. Eng. Moustafa Wahba?? Competency Assurance & TVET Consultant Scottish Qualification Authority SQA Qualified Internal Verifier IV???? Mobile: 00201001469376???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? E-mail address: [email protected] Skype Name: moustafa.wahba41 LinkedIn: https://www.dhirubhai.net/profile/view?id=110277913&goback=.gmp_8261