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Focus on the skills used to solve problems

David Botta

David Botta leads Ibbaka’s design research. See his skill profile here.

Which of the skills in a company skill profile matter?

This is not a simple question to answer. For one thing, it depends on whether you are looking inside the company or comparing one company to another. The answer could also depend on the nature of the company’s business. Does it do the same type of work over and over again, following optimizing processes? Or perhaps, it is a company that prides itself on taking on many different challenges, requiring diverse skill sets.

Could any of the following be the most important skill?

  • The most common skills?

  • The skills used most often on projects?

  • The skills with the highest average or median level of expertise?

  • The skills driving differentiation with other companies?

  • The skills providing diversity within the company?

To work out what are the most important skill sets, one often begins by filtering out very common skills that are ubiquitous within the company. Most people today have at least good basic skills with presentation software, spreadsheets and word processing. Thirty years ago, these might have been meaningful differentiating skills. Today, they these faded into the background in terms of differentiation.

What about a company where a large number of people claim Adobe Photoshop as a skill (which these days really means Adobe Creative Cloud). I was recently looking at a company where 24% of the people had this skill and decided to filter it out, thinking that it would not provide a lot of insight. I generally filter out skills held by 20% or more of the company in order to focus on the skills that bring the real strengths of the people into clarity.

I was talking to a friend about this and she challenged me. She insisted that Photoshop be kept, because people use that skill to solve problems. This caused me to rethink. I reflected to myself: “Hmm, I have used Photoshop to choose a gradation of colors together with tones that a colour-deficient person could distinguish.” By the way, I am significantly colour deficient. That is to say, I am good enough at Photoshop to use it to solve problems. There is a tipping point of expertise for a skill that can help clarify how people work with each other. The same could be said of people with advanced skills in using a spreadsheet

In this case, Photoshop was used by almost 24% of the people in this company. I reset my threshold to “keep all skills that are held by fewer than 25% of the people in the company.” This is just a rule of thumb, and one needs to look at the skill, its distribution, the levels of expertise, the kind of work the company does, and other factors. Filtering on skills is like adjusting the depth of field on a microscope and using different stains to bring out the structures. It is something you use to explore the data, not to reduce it.

This rule could be summed up as follows:

The skill that you use as your most general but necessary skill is the one that people use to solve problems. It has a required expertise level between Solid and Guru (3-5 on a five point scale).

Can you identify the skills that you, your team or your company uses to solve problems? Contact Ibbaka, to get a summary of the skills you use to solve problems.

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