Time to go beyond soft skills to uncover our enduring skills
Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.
On Friday February 21 I had the great good fortune to participate in a workshop on the Open Competency Model for Adaptation to Climate Change at the Adaptation Canada 2020 conference here in Vancouver. This was part of our work with the ResilienceByDesign Lab at Royal Roads University.
I was at the table for technical consultants, and we had a good group of very engaged young (and not so young) engineers together with people from standards bodies and government. Adaptation to climate change is a major business opportunity for engineering firms and they are building capabilities in this emerging discipline. Standards bodies are renewing their standards to account for more severe weather, higher average temperatures and rising sea levels. Governments, especially municipal governments, have been tasked with preparing adaptation pans.
One of the more interesting parts of the conversation was the tension between technical skills and social skills around collaboration, consensus building and active listening. One participant questioned the technical skills of many of the people involved in building adaptation plans. As an engineer, he felt strongly that adaptation to climate change required good knowledge of both Climate Science (many people agreed, it was the competency that got the most red dots (importance) at the end of the session. But the second most important competency was Collaboration. This one also got a lot of red dots from the table.)
One reason that collaboration was seen as so important is that the teams being put together to prepare for climate change are generally cross-disciplinary. There is no one discipline, let alone one person, with all of the skills needed to address the complex issues involved. Adaptation to climate change also requires building consensus among many different communities, often with different histories, values and interests. Succeeding with this requires many skills beyond engineering, design or climate science.
Such skill are often referred to as soft skills. The term means well, but is often used dismissively. Soft skills have been defined in many different ways. Some ‘experts’ differentiate job specific skills from more general soft skills. Others seem to see them as everything other than technical skills. Below is a popular post by Allison Doyle that defines them as “the personal attributes needed for success on the job.”
Does the division of skills into technical skills and soft skills really help us? We use skill and competency models to understand our own skills and the skills of the people we work with, to help build teams, to uncover current and future skill gaps, and to find and develop potential. Does the concept of soft skills help us with any of these? I don’t think so.
At Ibbaka we have a standard skill categorization system that we use on the Ibbaka Talent platform.
Some of our customers use this as is, others modify it and others use their own categorization systems. (The platform supports all of these possibilities).
Here are the categories we use.
Foundational - the skills used to develop other skills
Business - the skills used to manage a business or organization
Technical - practical applications of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) skills
Design - skills used in creative work
Tool - specific tools, everything from a hammer to a programming language like Python
Domain - skills associated with broad domains of knowledge, from industries like mining to cultures like Japan
Below you can see one way we use the skill categories in skill profiles.
Of course one can go much deeper in categorizing skills and develop deep nested hierarchies. We are taking a different approach though, and using a social tagging approach to make skill categorization more open and flexible.
At the Brandon Hall HCM Excellence Conference this year one speaker called on us to get beyond an obsession with rapidly changing skills and look to the enduring skills we can build together. For me our enduring skills are found mostly in our foundational and social skills. The skills that we use to build new skills and the skills that give our communities and teams cohesion.
How do you organize skills in your own mind and for your organization? Are soft skills a construct you use? Contact us and let’s begin a conversation.