Skill Kaleidoscopes

Career-Building Skills as Kaleidoscope Particles - The New & The Old

Kaleidoscopes tell visual stories with image reflections that harness the light and color of small particles in motion. They surprise and delight, igniting our imagination.

Each unique career trajectory is similar to a kaleidoscope that tells a visual story of our skills, seen as moving particles within an evolving environment.

With each career pivot, we connect new particles - recently acquired skills or dormant skills that we decide to re-activate, to existing particles - our transferable skills, in order to create new chapters in our career story.

Raising our skill awareness allows us to distinguish between transferable skills that served us well in the past, and other skills that we could leverage in future contexts, thereby bringing our kaleidoscope of skills together for higher-level accomplishments in life and work.

Connecting Individual Kaleidoscopes to Kaleidoscope Clusters

Moving past the individual scale to diverse career landscapes and networks, we can view complex organizational environments as ecosystems of kaleidoscopic career snapshots, building on each other in a constant state of interaction.

Such kaleidoscope constellations are being created constantly, whether we are aware of them or not. Starting with ourselves, an increased awareness of each of our skill kaleidoscope affords us agency in the stories we create, or help shape, in line with a chosen vision, mission and purpose.

"By wanting to identify your transferable skills, you are movable," writes Asha Aravindakshan in Skills: The Common Denominator, and continues: "When you can pair that understanding with the methods to approach your professional and personal networks, you can move towards career success."

Skill Recognition in Enriched Environments

The strength of flourishing networks, teams, and organizations rests on the ease and fluency with which skills are recognized and harnessed at individual and collective levels. Central to this is our recognition of transferable skills.

As Rob Cross demonstrates in Beyond Collaboration Overload, successfully mapping tasks onto network capabilities unleashes talent, potential, and amazing possibilities.

The talent-magnet leaders in any organization are key enablers of skill recognition, skills-to-role mapping, and skill evolution. Along with the talent they attract, they impact career inflection points and help create environments in their teams that promote healthy challenges, stretch, innovation, as well as psychological safety and spaces for reflection and vulnerability.

In the recently published Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us, authors Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross make an important distinction between types of environments and their effects on our health and state of mind.

Among the concepts from the multidisciplinary field of neuroaesthetics or neuroarts they cover, one concept sparked immediate connections in my mind: the concept of enriched environments, which I see as the building blocks of flourishing cultures everywhere.

In the introduction, Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross mention that they have come to think of their book as a kaleidoscope, "each story and piece of information forming colorful objects, beautiful patterns, and shapes within it."

Why Another Metaphor?

Imagining skills as the moving particles in a kaleidoscope is an open invitation to reflect on where we are now and the journey we have travelled to get here. Recognizing transferable skills remains key here, again.

As a prelude to reflection, the skill kaleidoscope metaphor mentally invokes meaningful encounters and partnerships with people who recognized my own potential, talent, and skills. In this sense, this metaphor is an exercise in gratitude for me. It also brings to mind the different types of enriched work and life environments I have been a part of. That is to say, when one is placed in an environment that enables skill enrichment and the use of transferable skills (our kaleidoscope), one can get into a flow state with ease and achieve more with less effort than in other environments, in service of a wider purpose.

Looking back on the past 90 days in my current role, where I have the opportunity to contribute to enabling a flourishing culture, I appreciate even more the power of pause during this Easter holiday, the time to recharge and reflect on the new - emerging skill kaleidoscopes, the old - foundational values and transferable skills, and the amazing benefits of co-creating enriched environments.

When we intentionally contribute to enriching personal and professional environments, we listen, give ourselves and others permission to be present, be ourselves, and do our best. We get to know and trust each other a little more each day. We can move past individual failures to simplify and amplify what we stand for through increased clarity. We grow, we evolve, we touch lives.