Next, What Are Your Skills?

You probably don’t have a “user manual of you.” But you should.

Pop Quiz: What are your top ten best-loved skills, in order of priority?

Most people run out of steam after listing three or four. Your skills are your human capacity to solve problems and accomplish your goals. You have dozens and dozens of skills. But most of us don’t have a good understanding of our own skills, especially the ones we’re good at, and most love to use (superpowers).

There are few words related to the world of work that have more subjective meaning than “skill.” To some, a skill is a field or a degree (lawyer, plumber). To some, it’s a body of knowledge (graphic design, app development). Some people equate skill with a physical or mental capacity (shooting a basketball, analyzing a speech). And to others, a skill is either hard (a discipline you were taught) or soft (something you picked up on your own).

I believe the most useful way to think about skills is that they are the way we intentionally channel our human energy. And the most useful scheme for categorizing those skills is, believe it or not, over 80 years old.

Back in the late 1930’s, when the U.S. began building the foundation for what became its post-war consumer-driven economy, a brilliant researcher, Sidney Fine, guided a team at the Department of Labor to analyze skills in tens of thousands of jobs. Sid suggested that we have three kinds of skills: Knowledges (which I’ve updated to call “Know Skills”), Transferable (“Flex”), and Self-Management (“Self”). There are lots of other categorizing schemes, but I still find this three-part approach the most useful. Know skills are bodies of knowledge (brain surgery, car repair), Flex skills work with data, people, or things in a range of situations, and Self skills focus on, well, ourselves (time management, completing tasks, etc.).

In an ideal world, we would all know our own skills. But there’s a peculiar part of our mental makeup that regularly discounts our own skills. We often think that, because we can do something well, everyone else can, too. That’s why I show that picture of an iceberg: There’s a huge amount of our human potential that’s below the cognitive waterline.

While each of us has weaknesses, it’s important to spend most of your energies understanding and developing your strengths. Marty Seligman (whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the Google Zeitgeist conference years ago), the “father of positive psychology,” suggests that we focus on understanding and developing our strengths. My father, Dick Bolles, always accentuated the positive when he developed skills inventory exercises. (And you can spend time on your weaknesses, too, if you find that helpful.)

When we’re young, we learn skills by trial-and-error, often accidentally discovering we’re good at something. As we grow, we can learn skills with more training and rigor. The best circumstances for adults to learn skills includes:

• Starting with a comprehensive inventory of our own skills. (Know what you’re good at, and what you love doing.)
• An idea of the skills we want to develop. (I call this a “north star” or “southern cross” for work.) That can be a future job idea, or an area of curiosity for you, or a known opportunity at your current employer.
• Access to the learning resources to start and continue that development.
• Support for the learning process. (Some of us do this on our own, but most of us need help.)

What do we call that process? I don’t like upskilling, reskilling, sideskilling, outskilling, or any other “skilling” labels. They sound too much like the industrial-era processes we’re trying to leave behind. Nobody “skills” you. You learn. So, “learning” is just fine.

We’re at an exciting point for modern humanity, when our rapidly-growing understanding of neuroscience, and the rapid development of artificial-intelligence software that can speed the process of learning, will combine to help us dramatically increase our ability to learn new skills. (Check out the work of people like Vivienne Ming , and companies like Ahuraai and Catalyte .) That will of course be important, because the shelf life of a lot of information (Know skills) will continue to decay, and many of us will need to continually learn new skills so we can solve new problems. And an increasing number of companies are making skills-development courses free or inexpensive, including 谷歌 , 微软 / LinkedIn , and 亚马逊 .

But employers will need to do their part as well. If they want to have talented workers to solve the problems of today and tomorrow, they’ll have to back off of traditional requirements (the perfect college degree, the perfect number of years of experience), and hire for Flex skills (problem-solving, critical thinking, collaborating) — which will also encourage greater social equity. Groups like Opportunity@Work and The Brookings Institution have focused on the critical need for employers to acknowledge the skills that people have already developed. And employers will absolutely need to invest in more skills training, especially for young workers — and stop charging workers for their training if they move to other companies.

A range of innovative startups have technology that can help organizations to develop skills inventories, including Faethm by Pearson , FutureFit AI , FitFirst Technologies , and SkyHive by Cornerstone . Inside organizations, a variety of providers offer software for internal skills marketplaces, such as ServiceNow and Fuel50 , implemented by end-user companies like NetApp and Vanguard Investments, Inc. ?

What should you do Next?

• If you’re at a point where you want to start your own self-inventory process — looking below the waterline — there are lots of ways to understand your skills. Some people like Clifton Strengths (formerly StrengthsFinders). Some like High5. There’s also the Strength Development Inventory, and the Situational Strengths Test, Believe it or not, even the energy drink company Red Bull has Wingfinder.
• If you want to do an inventory of your skills, I have two tools to offer, from our company eParachute:

A simple card sort (best for young people looking for ideas on fields to investigate)

A comprehensive video course that includes a set of skills inventory exercises (from the What Color Is Your Parachute? “Flower”).

We want these resources to be available to anyone. They’re both inexpensively priced. But if you need a discount or a free code, please email Kersey at [email protected].

• If you hire, encourage workers to do their own self-inventories, to develop their own career plans, and share that information between your team. (Don’t forget to do it yourself.)
• If the topic of skills interests you, check out our Skills Genome Project. Just as we have collectively cracked the code on the human genome at the cellular level, I believe we are on the verge of cracking the code on human skills. Early next year, I will be hosting a series of webinars for a range of stakeholders — HR professionals, educators, non-profits & NGOs, governments, startups, large software companies — interested in advancing our collective understanding of skills. Email Kersey at [email protected] to ask to be put on that mailing list.

Updates from the Mailbag:

• I wrote recently about The Great Mismatch — workers here, but work over there — and some people asked for examples. Case in point: LA truck drivers. Remember the massive supply chain backups at the Port of Los Angeles earlier this year? Now it’s the opposite. Plenty of truckers available, but far less work. That’s going to continue in places where in-person jobs don’t have a “match” with the local worker pool.?

-gB

Gary A. Bolles

I’m the author of?The Next Rules of Work: The mindset, skillset, and toolset to lead your organization through uncertainty. I’m also the adjunct Chair for the Future of Work for?Singularity Group. I have over 1.1 million learners for my courses on?LinkedIn Learning. I'm a partner in the consulting firm?Charrette LLC. I’m the co-founder of?eParachute.com. I'm an original founder of?SoCap, and the former editorial director of 6 tech magazines. Learn more at?gbolles.com