What is a skill? And how do you show you have one?
Skill: discrimination, reason. Related to ‘separate, distinguish, discriminate’
From Klein’s Comprehensive Entomological Dictionary of the English Language
We are obsessed with skills these days. Companies and politicians want a skilled workforce and worry about skill gaps. Individuals work hard to build up skills and young people are told to invest the 10,000 hours it is said is required to gain mastery in an area.
Our businesses worry about skills …
“37% of firms tell us that skills are a barrier to growth” UK Federation of Small Businesses
Our schools are told to focus on skills …
“How should our schools respond to the changing demands of the 21st C?”
Even our patent applications refer to people who are
The most popular thing on LinkedIn is skills endorsements. They are so popular that some people are beginning to push back against the LinkedIn approach.
In a work environment, skills are often used as a thumbnail to say who a person is and what they can do. This is especially true of hard skills like those applied in software engineering or design work. But is equally true of the soft skills that are so important for teamwork, team management and leadership.
TeamFit is built around skills and one of the key activities on our platform is rating and getting rated on skills. On TeamFit, you can only rate the skills of a person that you have worked with on a specific project. This grounds skills judgment in real work. One can drill all the way down to the skills used in specific industries, or with on a specific project. This grounds skills judgment in real work. One can drill all the way down to the skills used in specific industries, or with certain clients, or in geography.
On LinkedIn, my skills endorsements look like this.
On TeamFit things are a bit different. When skills are put in the context of projects a person’s real skills show up. And you can get a better understanding for how a person has grown their skills, who they have worked with, and how they apply what they know.
And people can even look to see what projects I have applied a specific skill on.
It is time for us to get serious about skills. How we develop them, rate them, share them and build teams around them. That is the journey that TeamFit has embarked on. We have just taken the first steps, and we hope you will come with us.
What do your skills say about you?