**Steven Forth** is a Co-Founder of TeamFit. See his Skill Profile.

We have begun a program of research into critical skills. There are several motivations for this. The most important is our interest in the role critical skills play in discovering and realizing human potential. This is central to our mission. We are also working to add new skills to the Ibbaka Talent SkillGraph as we prepare to make public our competency modelling environment. Searches find that some skills we regard as important are not showing up (these tend to be more abstract skills, the kinds that are more likely to be found in competency models than in people's actual descriptions of their work).

The skill research is also meant to support the design of a minimally simple skill model, so that people building competency models will be able to go a bit deeper and be able to link one skill to another.

Those of you who have taken our survey (thank you) may have wondered how we came up with the initial list of critical skills. This leads to the question 'What is a critical skill?' I think of critical skills as a blend of two different concepts, foundational skills and core skills. Foundational skills are one of Ibbaka’s default skill categories (along with Social, Business, Design, Technical, Tool and Domain). A foundational skill is a skill that one uses over ones life to build other skills. Core skills, on the Ibbaka Talent platform, are quite different. Users of our Skill Profile software can mark skills as Core, Target or Hidden. Core skills are the skills that one uses everyday in ones work and that are essential to that work. Target skills are skills one is working to develop. My own core and target skills are shown below.

Individual Skill Profile - Core and Target Skills

So critical skills are the intersection of foundational and core skills. This still misses one dimension, that of time. In general, critical skills are future looking. They are the skills we will be using in the future, not the skills we used in the past. Your target skills should be future looking.

This survey is meant to be fun and exploratory and by no means scientific or authoritative. The most interesting results were in (i) the skills that people suggested and (ii) the skills that very few people selected. Before we look at these, the five most popular choices were critical thinking, ideation, negotiation, collaboration and empathy. When I cut the data by role, the two most common roles are Executive and Designer. For executives, the critical skills were critical thinking, leadership, empathy, ideation, negotiation. For designers, the top five were critical thinking, sketching, logic, ideation, making connections. There is of course a lot of selection bias built in.

The skills people suggested were ...

curiosity
influencing
verbal articulation
spatial comprehension
play
design thinking

Curiosity is an interesting one. According to sales guru Jill Konrath, 82% of top sellers score extremely high on curiosity. I imagine the same is true of many other professions. Perhaps curiosity is a contributing skill to learning. (Learning came in sixth or seventh on most data cuts, I expected it to rate higher.) Influencing is another suggestion that caught my attention. When you stop to think about it, the cluster of influencing, persuading, convincing are important in many contexts. One could also argue that design thinking requires play to be successful.

The two skills that ended up at the bottom of the list were giving and abstraction (no one chose this). This was a bit of a personal disappointment as they are skills that I see as essential.

Giving. I learned while living in Japan that there is real skill involved in giving gifts. One has to take time and think about the social context and empathize with the person who will receive the gift and the people who will see the gift given. Many years ago, I had the great good fortune to attend a Potlatch at Alert Bay off the north east coast of Vancouver Island. A Potlatch is structured around giving. Giving reveals the social structure and the call for reciprocity weaves the society together. The same is largely true in the attention economy. By taking the time to take the survey, or to read this blog, you are giving me the gift of your attention. For which I thank you. As the attention economy grows, so will the importance of the skill of giving.

I also see abstraction as a critical skill, but perhaps the term is too abstract to mean much to people. What I intended is the ability to generalize a pattern and then to think by manipulating to pattern, or perhaps better, model. Scott Page has a wonderful book The Model Thinker about the many different ways of developing, thinking about and using models. Models populate our world. They are one of the most powerful ways we have of understanding it, and as the digital economy grows we frequently manipulate the world through models. Abstraction is one of the critical skills needed for model making. So yes, I do see abstraction as a critical skill.

Critical Skills - What are critical skills anyway?

Ibbaka posts on critical skills

Critical Skills - What are critical skills anyway?

Ibbaka posts on critical skills

Critical Skills - Learning

"From a little spark may burst a flame" ~ Dante Alighieri