Key skills signal strategy and differentiation

One often wants to compare skills. One could compare the skills of two people, two teams, the skills required for two roles and so on. Comparing companies can also give important insights into each company’s strategy and differentiation.

When comparing companies, people or roles to each other in terms of skills, you are looking for what is the same and what is different. If the companies, people or roles have a lot in common, it is hard to see how they differ. Some skills are widely held in companies; for example, “Microsoft Office”. Not only are skills like this widely held, there is a corporate expectation that the people who hold them are reasonably competent in them.

We have a standard approach where we compare three companies. The above image is a screenshot of skills that three actual companies (Aa, Bb and Cc) have in common. (Don’t try to read it; the image is only intended to show that there are a lot of them.) To see all the skills of say company Bb, in the following image you would have to turn on all of “Aa & Bb & Cc”, “(Aa & Bb) not Cc”, “(Bb & Cc) not Aa”, and “Unique to Bb”. The number of skills is daunting and hard to understand.

To sharpen the focus, it may help to look for something specific. For example, we asked ourselves what skills help a company perceive what is going on in the world and to respond intelligently. We noticed that “Data analysis” and “Strategy” show in all three companies (Aa, Bb, and Cc) as follows:

Data analysis: 42/391 (11%), 14/172 (8%), 16/106 (15%)
Strategy: 54/391 (14%), 25/172 (15%), 16/106 (15%)

The numbers are Number of People with Skill/Number of People in Company (Percent with Skill).

We then included only people who have at least one of these skills in our filtered view of the company comparison.

Did we learn something from this? Well, really understanding takes more than one try. For starters, perhaps all skills that include the word “strategy” should have been included in the filter. The same with “analysis”. Are there other terms that should be included in the filter? Multiple iterations are usually needed to bring skill differentiation into focus.

Even a first pass can provide insights. Both Aa and Bb have machine learning expertise while there is no mention of that in company Cc. Moreover, Aa might be puting proportionately more investment in it given the number of people with this skill.

Ibbaka has noticed that Roles can be difficult to assess against a competency model if they share too many skills. So the question arises, which skills are most important to a Role in terms of their impact on performance. Other skills could then be siphoned off into a common role that has all of the skills required for a specific discipline. For example, the role of Joiner (woodworking) might be assessed on making a perfect dovetail joint in some troublesome wood that wants to tear out or chip. A good result means that a woodworker in that Role can do almost any joint and easily learn the rest. Plus, that woodworker has expertise in a number of areas and can likely play a number of woodworking roles that require similar expertise.

Let us call these special skills “key skills”, because they unlock differentiation. In many cases, whether when comparing companies or understanding the differences between roles, it is these key skills that make the difference.

Ibbaka Posts on Competency Models and Competency Frameworks

Key skills signal strategy and differentiation (this post)
Competency models as learning plans