Skills are becoming the new currency of talent management. The skills you have, how you are putting them to use, your potential are as important as relationships to shaping your career.

Here are some simple things you can do to improve your personal skill management.

Know what your skills are
Represent them in a skill profile
Connect them to your work
Use skills with other people
Have a plan to develop your skills and the skills of the people around you

Know what your skills are

This sounds easy, doesn’t it. After all, we should know what we are good at and what we are able to do. In fact, when asked about our skills, many of us are unsure how to anwer. Some of us feel a bit shy and don’t want to make excessive claims, or we aren’t able to talk about our tacit knowledge (tacit knowledge is all of those things that we know how to do but can’t explain how we do them). Other people sometimes exaggerate their skills. This can be a good thing, if it signals the skills a person respects and is tying to develop.

We have found three good ways to discover one’s own skills.

Map out a few workdays, note down what you do, and the skills that you need as you go through your work. Most people are surprised at all the skills they use, even on a typical day.
Think about who you work with and the skills that you use together with them. We often use different skills with different people, our interactions with people are an entrance into our skills. While you are doing this, do the person a favour and let them know what skills they use when working with you.
Consider the different roles that you play. Most of us play many different roles, at work and in our communities. Each of these roles has skills associated. Roles could be part of a formal job, roles on a team, ad-hoc roles (I am doing this off the side of my desk) or roles played in the community. For many people, these community roles are an important source of new skills.

Most of us see our skills change over time. For some people, at intense points of their lives, skills change daily, at other times, the pace of change may be slower, a monthly or even annual cadence. In may case, I think about this on a weekly basis, and keep my learning in line with the skills I am developing.

Represent them in a skill profile

Having some way to represent your skills is useful. It is first of all useful for yourself, as a tool for reflection, learning and planning. One of the best books on learning is The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action by Donald Schon. If you want to get better you need to take time to reflect on what you are doing. Reflection is easier with some sort of record.

Other people may also want to know what your skills are as well. Colleagues who you work with, managers, and younger people who want to follow the path you have taken may all be interested in your skills.

At Ibbaka we spend a lot of time investigating all the different ways there are to represent skills and show them in a skill profile. See What is a skill profile.

Connect your skills to your work

Skills in the abstract are not all that interesting. Knowing that a person has a skill is one thing, knowing how they apply it is quite another. Mapping your skills to the different roles you play and the different teams that you work on is a powerful way to see how you are using your skills. This needs to go deeper than the job level to be actionable. Most jobs are composed of bundles of roles and understanding which skill you use for which role will help you find your strengths and weaknesses.

Connecting your skills to your work can also help you find new ways to apply your existing skills. This works two ways. One can see ways to improve performance in existing roles by applying new skills to that role. Or one can find new roles where your skills are relevant.

Take a few minutes this week to look at your skills ands roles and ask, which skills am I not using in a critical role, and which could I be.

To take a very personal example, I have started coaching one of my granddaughters on math. She is verbally precious but a bit of a laggard with math.

One of my own skills is drawing, sometimes surprising, connections between things. I am using the Mindset Mathematics approach in this coaching, and a big part of this approach is using visual and physical metaphors to deepen understanding. I did not realize this at first, but as I learned more about the Mindset Mathematics approach I could find more and more ways to apply my skills to this coaching.

Use skills with other people

Much of the work we do today is done in teams. This means that our skills become meaningful when used with the skills of other people, and that these skills can amplify each other.

Think of a soccer team (or football depending where you live). Something as simple as making a pass and receiving a pass requires great skills by two different people. Or look at a professional kitchen, and watch the orchestration of different skills and the call and response used to keep work organized.

This is why Step 3 in Know what your skills are is so important. “Think about who you work with and the skills that you use together with them.” Our skills are one of the ways that we connect with other people. Finding people to work with, where their skills complement your own and cover for your weaknesses, is deeply satisfying. It also makes you a lot more effective.

The skills that matter to your own performance are often the skills of the people you work with.

The striker on a football team may not score many goals if there is no one to make good passes.

Have a plan to develop your skills and the skills of the people around you

Managing one’s skills includes having a plan on how to improve them. Here a balanced approach works best.

Balance comes in two forms: across levels of expertise and across skill categories.

Most of us have skills where we are solid, expert, or even gurus. It is important to invest into your strengths and keep these skills current. Have at least one skill where you aspire to become a guru (or whatever the top level of your skill expertise hierarchy may be).

That is not the whole story though, you also want to be introducing new skills into your life. A good balance is to have about one fifth of your skills be relatively new and immature, these are the new skills you are bringing in, and about one tenth be skills where you are tying to become a guru.

Working on your own skills is a good thing, but it also makes sense to invest time and effort in helping other people to build up their own skills.

One reason for this is that teaching is one of the best ways to develop your own skills. There is a lot of truth to the old adage ‘learn one, do one, teach one.’ One also benefits from the skills of the people around one, as was discussed above. But perhaps the best reason to help other people learn is simply to ‘pay it forward.’ Someone helped you to develop your own skills. Help other people to develop their skills.

Ibbaka posts on competency models and competency frameworks