The Paradox of Skills: Do We Really Know What We Mean?

LinkedIn is an amazing place to find people talk about skills and technology but most have not got a clue. In particular influencers who promote "keyword matching and scrapping" tools under the label of "skill driven FAKE AI". Let's deep dive into this.....

We live in a world obsessed with skills. Employers demand them, schools promise to teach them, and individuals claim to have them. But for all the emphasis placed on skills, there’s a fundamental problem: no one really knows what a "skill" is. Sure, we can describe it—a skill is the ability to do something well. But does that definition hold up under scrutiny? What does it mean to have a skill? Can you possess a skill yet fail to demonstrate it? Is a skill even real if it only exists in certain contexts?

1. The Fluid Nature of Skills: Are They Real or an Illusion?

We often think of skills as something we own, like an asset we carry with us. "I have coding skills," or "I’m good at public speaking." But in reality, skills are not fixed objects—they are constantly in flux, shaped by the environment, the task at hand, and even our emotional state. Imagine a coder who thrives in a quiet room, crafting brilliant algorithms, but falters in a high-pressure team setting. Does that coder really "have" coding skills? Or are those skills conditional, like a firefly that only glows in the dark?

The idea of having a skill is like holding water in your hands: you think it's there, but it changes form the moment you try to grip it tightly. A "skilled" individual in one context may become completely ineffective in another. Yet, we talk about skills as if they are concrete—this is the first myth we need to unravel.

2. The Gap Between Saying and Showing

Imagine telling someone, "I can cook." It's a simple claim. But saying you can cook and preparing a gourmet meal for 20 people under tight deadlines are two very different things. A person can say they have a skill and even believe it deeply, but the real test is in the demonstration. Here’s where the phantom skill comes into play: a skill that you think you possess but can't reliably perform when it matters most.

This phantom skill effect plagues industries where people are promoted for their "potential" or hired based on a CVs filled with skill-buzzwords like "leadership" or "data-driven decision-making." Yet, how often have we seen people falter when they’re asked to actually deliver on those so-called skills? Are they ever held accountable for this gap? And if they’re not, what does that say about our collective understanding of what it means to be skilled?

The gap between having and showing a skill isn’t just about overconfidence. It reveals a deeper flaw in how we view expertise. Skills aren’t something you own—they’re something you perform, and performance is inherently unstable.

3. Skills as a Social Construct

When we talk about skills, we're not just talking about abilities. We’re talking about what society values as important. Think about it: coding wasn’t a widely sought-after skill in the 1950s. Neither was social media marketing in the early 2000s. What we label as a "skill" is a reflection of societal needs and technological trends, not some objective measure of human capability.

In the corporate world, we reward skills that benefit the bottom line. In academia, we elevate analytical thinking. In the arts, creativity is king. But if you take the greatest artist and drop them in a corporate boardroom, they might fail miserably. Is that person then "unskilled," or is the environment simply misaligned with their abilities?

This begs the question: are skills really an inherent part of us, or are they societal creations that shift depending on the values of the time? If coding becomes irrelevant tomorrow, does that make today’s coders unskilled? When we look closely, we find that skills are not universal truths but contextual agreements.

4. The Role of Context in Skill Validation

Take a skill like leadership. A military leader, a CEO, and a community organiser all claim to be leaders, but the contexts in which they lead are vastly different. A CEO might thrive in the boardroom but flounder on the battlefield, while a military leader’s command tactics may seem rigid in a startup environment. Leadership is still there, right? But it’s changed, adapted to its surroundings. The skill may be the same in name, but in practice, it’s almost a different beast entirely.

This contextual dependency can be maddening because it means we can never really pin down what a skill is. The moment you define it, the moment you think you’ve mastered it, the ground shifts beneath your feet. Skills in isolation are meaningless—they only come alive in context, and that context is never static.

5. The Future of Skills: Do They Even Matter?

Here’s where things get really uncomfortable. We are on the verge of a future where many of today’s prized skills—coding, data analysis, even some forms of creative work—might be automated by AI and machine learning. What happens when these machines outskill us? Do we, as humans, become obsolete? Or will we redefine skills to mean something entirely different, something uniquely human?

Some argue that the future will value emotional intelligence, creativity, and empathy above technical proficiency. But even these "soft" skills are hard to define, harder to measure, and can be just as contextual as their technical counterparts. Will future employers ask for "creativity skills" like they do for coding today? If so, how will we quantify it? And if we can’t, does that mean creativity is not a skill at all?

The truth is, we don’t know what the future holds for skills, but one thing is certain: the way we understand and talk about skills today is bound to be radically different from how we will in a decade. And maybe, just maybe, skills as we know them today will become as outdated as the abacus.

Final: The Skill Illusion

Skills are slippery, elusive, and deeply misunderstood. We like to think they’re solid markers of competence, but the reality is more unsettling. Skills are fluid, context-dependent, and shaped by societal forces more than personal mastery. Claiming to have a skill doesn’t guarantee you can perform it, and even the ability to demonstrate a skill is no guarantee that it will matter tomorrow.

So next time you start to waste business profits on "keyword technology" then think twice.