We have been investing more in skill curation over the past weeks. AIs are all well and good, but in our case they still need human guidance. This gives us a chance to look at the new skills that are flowing into the platform and think about what they mean and how they are being used.

Before we go on, please take a few minutes to contribute to our survey on competency model design.

The Ibbaka Talent Platform currently has seven skill categories.

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

Languages - spoken human languages like Portuguese, Arabic, English and Creole.

The Platform can support multiple category systems, and some of our larger customers have chosen to use their own categories rather than the above defaults.

Why have skill categories? They are a convenient way to get a higher level picture of the skills of a person, team, even an organization. One can quickly look at a skill profile and see if technical, design or business skills dominate.

Looking at skills that have fallen into the ‘Other’ category, we found a group that we think may be a new category that we should consider adding to our system.

• Go (the game and not the language)

• Chess

• Piano

• Monopoly

• Basketball

• Bridge (the card game, not the thing that crosses rivers)

• Jazz composition

• Jazz improvisation

• Colorist (for comic books)

• Still life drawing

• Portrait photography

Where does one put these in a skill category system? An organization that is specialized in music, or in artistic production, or I suppose a game company, might want to build an entire category system around these and many related skills. But for the general case, which is what our default category system is for, we have to keep the number of categories to a minimum and we don’t really want to go beyond the current seven. On the other hand, these skills can be relevant to understanding a person’s potential. Games like Bridge or Poker imply a range of other skills (facility with calculating probabilities, the ability to read people). I know one company that goes out of its way to hire people who can play musical instruments. Some sales cultures look for people who have played team sports.

So we are considering adding a category for Arts - Games - Sports.

It does feel a bit uncomfortable to lump these together. This is a pretty fuzzy category. On the other hand, we don’t want to add additional categories and we are determined not to go beyond nine. Should we use one of our scarce category slots in this way?

Long term, we want to complement our category system with open tagging of skills, and enable the social generation of category systems. Until then, we will continue to wrestle with designing category systems that help people to understand their own skills , the skills of people around them, and that support organizations as they create meaningful ways to put skills to work.