Skills has come to the front of business conversations over the past few months, with organizations like the World Economic Forum (WEF) saying that skills are the currency of the labor market and the whole skills as currency meme getting broad traction (see Skills are the currency of the future': The rise of a skills-based economy).

But what are skills and how do they differ from competencies? I like the shorthand description that Eric Shepherd of the Talent Transformation Guild has offered. “Competencies are skills in context,”

There is a hint here to how we can help people to understand and articulate their own skills. Give them context.

One of the most powerful ways to uncover skills is the skill interview. This is a structured approach where one has a conversation with someone about their own or their team’s skills. The output is a coded transcript that calls out and categorizes the skills identified, categories or tags them and begins to build a skill profile.

A number of the these skills profiles can then be linked together to begin a skill graph. A skill graph is the a collection of skills that are connected to each other, to jobs, roles, tasks and activities, and that, most importantly, connect people to each other through their skills.

Skill interviews can be tricky. Simply asking people “What skills do you have?” is often met with a blank stare and a stumbling, of ‘uhh, I don’t know, umm, I guess maybe …’ That is how I answered anyway, and I spend a lot of time thinking about this.

Most of us are not good at telling people what our skills are. Part of this is modesty, part a lack of self awareness, but the main reason is that skills take on meaning in context.

What context?

We have found there are four different ways to enter a skill interview: through goals, through tasks and by asking about social relationships. Different approaches work best for different peoples and tend to discover different skills.

Enter through goals

One way to put skills into context is to ask people about their personal, team and organizational goals. Ask about the goals, then ask about the skills needed to achieve those goals. It is usually easier to begin with individual goals, but some executives find it easier to talk at the organizational level.

Establish the goals, then ask about the skills needed to achieve those goals, then explore shortcomings.

Enter through tasks and activities

An alternative approach is to ask about the tasks and activities (a task is something that has a clear beginning, end and outcomes or completion criteria, an activity is something that has no fixed end and is often repeated on a regular basis - writing a blog post is a taks, maintaining a blog is an activity).

Most people are happy to talk about their routines and this is a good way to enter the skill conversation for many people.

It is important to explore an ordinary day, but also to find out what skills are used when the routine changes or is disrupted, and to discover those exceptional events where new skills emerge or potential skills called forth.

Enter through relationships

Most of us work with other people and rely on others to be successful in the work that we do. So another way to enter a skill interview is to ask

“Who do you work with?”

“What skills do you use when you work with that person?”

“What skills do they bring to the relationship?”

“What skills do you bring to the relationship?'‘

Even when you enter through a different door, it is often worth exploring the interplay of relationships and skills. This can be a way to connect to team skills as well.

Enter through learning

There is a close connection between skills and learning. We often rely on learning to build new skills and the most important foundational skills are the skills used to build and apply new skills.

Asking about learning can be a good way to break the ice and get people talking about their sills. Even a simple question, like “How did you learn the skills you use in your current role?” can get people going.

It can also help to build connections between past, present and future.

“How are you applying the skills you used in a past role to your current role?”

“How do you think you will use the skills you are learning today in the future?”

In some cases, you can even ask people about their learning style and the skills that they use to learn.

Skill interview for teams

Teams are where a lot of our works gets done and understanding the interplay of skills on teams is one of the most important challenges of skill and competency management. Skill interviews have a role to play here.

One entry point is suggested above, the people door. Asking about the people the subject works with, and the skills they used when working together, can give insights into team skills. To really get into this, one has to interview a group of people who work together and then piece the interviews together. This can be complex and time consuming, but it almost always uncovers surprising insights into team dynamics.

Another approach is to interview the team together, and lead them into a conversation on their skills. This requires a skilled facilitator. We will be sharing a number of these group interviews over the next month, beginning with a team that creates animations for training videos (project manager, script writer, editor/reviewer, storyboard creator, animator etc.)

Building skill and competency models that deepen our understanding of team performance and enable higher levels of performance is a high priority goal for Ibbaka.

Coding the interview

Once you have a collection of interviews, what should you do? You will likely have many different impressions, some of them reinforcing, others contradictory. To make sense of all of this information you need some kind of organizing framework that you can apply to this data.

At Ibbaka, we code these interviews so that the key constructs are marked up. We begin by looking for skills and applying a category system. It is important to have an ‘other’ category so that the fit of the category system can be tested.

One often wants to go beyond skills though. Other things to look for are

• Roles

• People

• Behaviors

• Values

• Tasks

• Activities

• Resources

This list will look familiar to many people. These are the sorts of things that show up in competency models.

The two ways we code documents at Ibbaka are by adding tags into the transcript.

“I generally learn by <skill:foundational>teaching</skill> other people.”

An alternative approach, often easier for people, is to combine color coding and commenting.

Once the interviews have been coded, and a quality assurance cycle applied to the coding itself to test for consistency, one needs to compile the results.

There are many ways to do this: skill tables, skill graphs and so on. The best format will depend on what you need to do next. You might be building a skill and competency model, or you could be diagnosing the relation between skills and performance. In some cases, these skill interviews inform learning design.

At Ibbaka we generally just load them into the Ibbaka Talent Platform and attach the interview to an individual skill profile or to a competency model that we are developing, or sometimes both.

A guide for skill interviews

The following is a guide we have used for skill interviews with a number of different organizations. Try it out with a few of your colleagues, and have someone interview you. It is amazing what you can learn.

Interview Goals

1. Build a rapport. Show interest in their work and success.

2. Stimulate conversations and thinking about skills and expertise.

3. Understand the goals of the organization and how skill management contributes to this.

4. Understand the core skills for the organizations, touch on foundational and social and, depending on the person's role, go into business, design or technical skills.

5. Learn more about what we need to know in order to deliver an effective change management program.

6. Uncover additional future requirements.

Open ended, guiding questions

Preamble

Our goal is to understand the critical skills and expertise at your organization and how these help your, your team and organization achieve your goals. We are also interested in understanding your own skills a bit better, how they contribute to your role, how you apply them, and the skills you use with your colleagues. We would also like to understand more about the role understanding skills and expertise play today and its potential for the future.

1. Tell us about your typical day, the roles you play, who you work with. (Goal is to ease into the interview and get some context we will use later to interpret the interview).

2. What are the critical skills you use in your work with (colleague’s name)? (Want to pick up more on the social interplay of skills.)

3. What are your most important skills? (Core skills) What are your aspirational skills? (Target Skills)?

4. What skills do you need to work with your team effectively?

5. How do you go about cultivating and supporting the skills of people on your team?

6. What are your organization’s high level goals and what skills are needed to achieve these goals?

7. How do you discover other people's skills today?

8. What are the most important new capabilities, expertise and skills that your organization needs to develop? How is progress on developing these tracked today?

9. How are skills used in selecting people for teams today? What systems are used to support this?

10. What impact would a system that helped people to validate and demonstrate their skills have your organization?

11. How would you design an overall skill management system for organization?

12. What needs to be done to support the adopt of an skill management system?

Thank you for your time today. How would you like us to follow up with you?