Three ways to develop your skills profile
Skills are critical to job success. They are how you demonstrate what you can accomplish, figure our what you need to learn, and they are necessary to you finding work.
Work for an organization?
Your skills become your record of achievement and how you develop your skills will shape your career. Your bosses and your colleagues need to understand your current skills, how you have applied them. But that is not enough, they also need to know what skills you aspire to and what kinds of projects you want to work on.
Want to work for an organization?
Your existing skill set is the prime filter used by a company when choosing people for a role. Today people try to guess actual skills from resumes and then go over and see what skills have been endorsed on LinkedIn. If you are a coder, they may check you out on Github and Stackoverflow as well. If you’re a designer, well then, your portfolio matters. But what people are really trying to figure out is whether you have the skills, or can learn the skills, you need to do the job.
Part of the gig economy?
People will look at your current skills when they decide whether to hire you. You need to know what skills are in demand and what skills will be in demand. Not getting chosen for projects, you need to know why not.
Ask “What skills am I using?”
Some people lean on LinkedIn to show people their skills and win endorsements. There are many limits to the LinkedIn approach, see “What is a skill? And how do you show you have one?”
But most people care about the skills you have used most recently. TeamFit will tell you this. Looking at TeamFit CTO Lee Iverson, we can see that his top ten skills on LinkedIn are as shown below.
When we look at these three most recent projects on TeamFit, we get a much more focused view.
The skills you have used most recently are the ones that are likely to be most relevant.
Ask “What skills am I losing?”
Recent skills are the most relevant because in today’s fast-paced world skills are pretty much a use it or lose it proposition. Some people even ask, “What is the half-life of a skill?”
It is a good idea to check and see what skills you have that you are not applying. Is it important to you that you apply these skills and keep them current? If so, you need to advocate to get on the projects where you will apply them and make sure that you stay current.
TeamFit is planning to add a decay rate for skills, so that if a person is not using a skill on projects the SkillRank™ for the skill would trend down as would the confidence measures.
SkillRank™
Content goes hereSkillRank is TeamFit’s patent pending system for estimating a person, team or organization’s ranking on a specific skill. It takes into account many different inputs to estimate a rank and the system’s confidence in the ranking – and yes, it is a Bayesian approach.
Ask “What skills am I missing?”
Our skills profiles are like our fingerprints. They capture our unique experience. That can make it interesting to compare our own skill profiles with our colleagues and see how they compare. This can help us to uncover holes in our own profiles. Sometimes these holes are an oversight, we have the experience but have not yet claimed it, but in other cases we have to go out and seek the experiences (projects) that will help us to grow the skills we need.
Above are the summaries of the key skills, as demonstrated by actual project experience, of TeamFit founders Amar Dhaliwal and Steven Forth. Let’s see what they look like on LinkedIn.
Amar on LinkedIn
Steven on LinkedIn
It is interesting how different the TeamFit and LinkedIn skills profiles are. The TeamFit profiles are focused and can be linked to actual project work. The LinkedIn skills profiles are more abstract and aspirational. ‘SaaS’ shows up in all four cases. Amar also has overlaps between TeamFit and LinkedIn for ‘Start-Ups’ and ‘Enterprise Architecture.’ For Steven the overlap is ‘SaaS’ and ‘Business Strategy.’
On TeamFit, the only overlap between Steven and Amar is SaaS (Software as a Service). Both of them have actually led SaaS businesses (in Amar’s case at Saba and in Steven’s case at Monitor Group and LeveragePoint).
In the future, TeamFit will let you see what skills are needed for specific roles and where you fall short, and what improvements you can make to your skill profiles that will improve your TeamMatch™ score for specific projects. You will also be able to see how the skills a person has applied to projects has changed over time, and how their expertise has grown and decayed.
TeamMatch™
TeamMatch is our measure of how well an individual matches a specific project role given the other people that are already on the project team.
How do you keep track of your skills?
What are you doing to develop a skills profile that will get you the work that you want in the future?