Core Concepts: Skill Categories
By Gregory Ronczewski, Director of Product Design at Ibbaka. See his skill profile.
Definition of Skill Categories
Categorization is a fundamental cognitive ability: living or not living; organized by traits, features, similarities; concrete objects or abstract ideas. Categorization as an activity is critical in almost any human activity. It is deeply rooted in the philosophy of Plato's work, presenting the approach of "grouping objects based on their properties." Aristotle took it further in his Categories treatise, where he analyzes the differences between classes and objects. From ancient times, the ideas centred around categorization appeared in the works of Descartes, Pascal, Locke ,Russel and very importantly Ranganathan who introduced Colon or Faceted classification. Modern categorization theory represents our current understanding of how the brain learns and works. There is Prototype Theory, Exemplar Theory and Conceptual Clustering. Although categorizing appears almost anywhere we go, there are some potentially negative implications, especially when one tries to apply categories to people, leading to dehumanization and division. There are also potential problems with miscategorization. But let's start with a few definitions.
Definitions
Categorization:
the action or process of placing into classes or groups.
a system of classes into which something is sorted.
Skill Categorization:
SkillsCan: Skills can be classified into three main types: Transferable/Functional, Personal Traits/Attitudes, and Knowledge-based.
Wikipedia: technical, human, and conceptual.
LinkedIn: knowledge, transferable skills and self-management skills.
Ibbaka skill categorization
Ibbaka has a default system for skill classification in its skill management platform. This classification approach can be customized or supplemented, but it often provides a good starting place.
Foundational skills: the skills we use to develop other skills. This includes all of the basics, reading and writing and arithmetic, basic logic, critical thinking, generative thinking, etc. It also contains meta-skills like learning.
Social skills: the skills we use to build relationships with and work with other people.
Domain skills: vast domains of human knowledge, such as knowledge of an industry, a culture or a discipline. A large collection of domain skills, properly connected, is a knowledge map.
Business skills: the many skills used to conduct business and manage an organization. The ‘B’ and the ‘A’ in MBA.
Technical skills: engineering, computer science, some of the more specialized forms of design.
Design skills: creative work of all kinds, from architecture and graphic design to User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) to more abstract forms like Service Design and Instructional Design.
Tool skills: everything from hammers and drills to programming languages like Python and software packages like Photoshop.
Other skills: as with any classification, some skills will not fit into any category. However, on Ibbaka Talent, this space is reserved most of the time for the skills included in the system but are not yet placed in the correct categories.
What is the best way to categorize skills? It may look simple, but it is often quite difficult to agree on the classification even with just three categories. With many options/categories, it is even harder. We believe that our eight categories work well on the platform and are a good starting point. However, a skill can often belong to more than one category. For instance, for an accountant, Accounting will be a Domain Skill. In some way, it could also belong to Technical Skills or even a Foundational Skill. Possibly a tagging systems would allow organizing skills into clusters representing the actual, everyday application. The platform also allows different skill categories as some of our customers already have their own unique categorization in place.
How would you organize your skills?
Which categorization system works best from your perspective?
Join Ibbaka Talent - we have everything you need to begin.
Core Concepts: Skill Management and Competency Modelling
Skill Categories (this post)
Competency Framework and Competency Model
Coming soon …
Skill Assessment
Core Concepts: Pricing and Customer Value Management
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Value Driver
Economic Value Driver
Emotional Value Driver
Community Value Driver
Value Model
Pricing Model
Connecting Value and Pricing Models
Pricing Design
Package Design
Price Elasticity of Demand
Cross Price Elasticity
Interactions of Cross Price Elasticity and Price Elasticity of Demand
Value Based Market Segmentation
Value Path
Lifetime Value of a Customer (LTV)
Value to Customer (V2C)
Value Ratio
Economic Value Estimation (EVE)
Willingness to Pay (WTP)
Pocket Price Waterfall
Customer Value Journey
Customer Value Management