What is skill management?

By Alexis Katigbak, Platform Product Manager at Ibbaka. See her skill profile.

Skill management can be an incredibly empowering aspect of talent management. One that is critical to driving a business forward. Once an organization determines a strategy, the next question that comes up is “do we have the people to execute on this vision?” That is where skill management comes in. What does it mean to build a skill management system, and how should an organization apply it to succeed? This post unpacks the fundamentals of skill management - from deciding on the vision to executing on the systems.

The key business questions skill management answers

When do you know that you need skill management?

How do you apply skill management? 

The first place to start is to understand the key business questions that need to be answered. At Ibbaka, we’ve boiled it down to these six general questions (we go much deeper into these in this post):

1. What skills are available to our organization?

2. How are these skills being applied?

3. Do we have the skills we need to meet today’s goals?

4. Will we have the skills we need to meet tomorrow’s goals?

5. Are there hidden pockets of potential we can deploy?

6. Who are the critical people on our team?

These questions frame how an organization or team should think about defining the goals and objectives of their skill management program. Goals and objectives cascade into people strategies and these define how the skill management system should be developed.

This can be framed using Roger Martin’s cascading choices framework.

These are not just questions at an organizational level. Individuals often want to ask these questions about themselves, their colleagues and the people on teams with them. We need to help them to answer these questions.

Making skill management succeed - it takes a two-way conversation

Success in skill management cannot just be top down. It requires real conversations between people. You have to make space for people to talk about their jobs, roles and skills and those conversations have to have consequences. They need to lead to changes in job and role descriptions and the provision of learning resources.

1. Individuals - individuals need to be motivated to re-skill and upskill. They need to understand what opportunities open up by maintaining a skill profile and investing in their own learning and development. We believe hope is the best motivation for upgrading skills. This manifests differently across individuals with different career or personal aspirations. What skills people have, how to develop target skills and how to put skills to work for each other should all become part of day-to-day conversations.

2. Teams - teams are an important part of how we work. The roles we play on teams are as important to our career as our formal job titles. Understanding the skills on teams and how they connect people is an important part of skill management. Think of your career as a braid of all of the different roles you play, many of which are on teams.

3. The organization - the driver for an organization is aligns to the business model. Sometimes this means driving more existing business (larger accounts, more projects), other times this means navigating a shifting business model and making sure staff reskill and upskill in alignment to that. And often, this is related to the competition for talent.

Effective skill management will align the personal incentives of individuals to their teams and to the organizational strategy and objectives. Individuals need to see opportunities and want to grow in their realms of current (or new) expertise. Organizations need to recognize the diversity of individuals and invest in the areas they are best suited to leverage, further creating new opportunities. A good skill management program will optimize the symbiotic relationship between these forces. 

Key use cases to address key business questions

What kind of impact can skill management have? There are several ways this moves the needle, and each depends on the dynamics of an organization’s business model:

1. Optimize skills for business performance - leading companies need to understand what skills differentiate their organization. Skill insight clarifies competitive positioning - not just in firms that provide services, but in organizations that are innovating in new territory. 

2. Optimize skills for engagement and retention - skill insights allow people to discover ways to leverage, apply and develop existing and new expertise. This leads to the personalization of experiences to shape one’s career, or opportunities one could not even fathom without ample insight. This correlates to improved employee retention and has an economic impact on organizations that can scale if done right. 

3. Optimize skills to win more work - professional services firms leverage their people best when they are able to match their staff with projects best suited to leverage AND develop their skills. Knowing what skills are available and what skills an organization wants to develop can optimize matching teams to opportunities that drive the organization forward.

4. Prepare for the future of work - Skill management can transform how an organization prepares for future work scenarios. The future can be impacted by a combination of disruptors at various degrees of intensity. By applying scenario planning and investing in various outcomes, an organization can be better prepared and make their workforce resilient to change.

Skill management process

An effective rollout of skill management involves the following steps:

• Understanding the goals of skill management - are you trying to start with understanding skills available? Is the intent to optimize winning more work today? Are you launching a new business or product with existing or new people? Or are you preparing for various future scenarios? Understanding the goals of the rollout will determine which areas need focus and how best to support them.

• Understanding approach to support goals - should skills evolve top down with a standard job architecture or competency model or is the preference to crowd source and evolve them bottoms up? Often, organizations will want to do both but the degree to which they are implemented depend on the organization’s culture and appetite to manage change.

• Understanding which processes need to be added, or modified - a successful rollout will depend on the data being updated at the right place and time. An organization must design a process for updating their skill and competency models (if there are any) at the individual level and at the organizational level. Examples include:

  • Professional services requesting individuals to update skills at the end of an engagement while 

  • HR operations requesting talent acquisition to look up existing jobs in a model before hiring externally or proposing new jobs if there is lack of alignment in the model to prevent “job sprawl”

Once an understanding of the vision and required process changes is established, then an organization can move into considering the tools and systems needed to support that. 

Skill management systems

Many companies already have a skill management system somewhere. Often they will look for specific solutions because the existing system does not provide enough information or insight to uncover and address a skills gap. 

A system must be able to connect skills in the context of work, uncover skill gaps and integrate with other systems to support talent management processes. Each system and approach has benefits and drawbacks. It is important for an organization to understand their must have and nice to have capabilities in such a system. 

For more on this topic, we do a deep dive into skill management alternatives in this blog post. 

How skill management impacts the future of work

We’ve written about scenario planning for the future of work extensively in the past years and the dynamics of business exert different types of forces on organizations, forcing innovation and forcing adoption of new skills. 

In order for businesses to sustain growth and innovation, they need to empower their workforce to upskill, reskill and sustain individual career growth and innovation. This leads to investments in understanding what is possible today, and working towards what can be possible tomorrow. Skill management is one of the many ways to achieve that. 

Ibbaka Posts on Competency Models and Competency Frameworks

• Competency models as learning plans

• From user experience to competency model design - Margherita Bacigalupo and EntreComp

• Competency framework designers on competency framework design: Jeff Griffiths on transversal and vertical skills

• Competency framework designers on competency framework design: The chunkers and the slice and dicers

• Competency framework designers on competency framework design: Victoria Pazukha

• Two podcasts on competency model design from Vancouver

• The A in KSA is for Abilities or Attitudes or Attributes?

• Do competency frameworks need competency definitions?

• Should you have a personal competency model?

• Designing a skill competency model - the Ibbaka approach

• Design research - How do people approach the design of skill and competency models?

• Designing a blueprint for your competency model framework

• From competency model design to competency model generation

• The WEF on Building a Common Language for Skills at Work

• Aligning skill and competency models with microcredentials - a conversation between Don Presant and Kul Sharma

• Three Metaphors for Skills and Competencies

• The Skills for Career Mobility - Interview with Dennis Green

• Competencies or skills - what should you assess?

• Lessons Learned Launching and Scaling Capability Management Programs

• Designing a Competency Model for Innovation Coaches

• Talent Transformation - A Conversation with Eric Shepherd, Martin Belton and Steven Forth

• Who cares about skill and competency models

• Competency Model Definitions - the IEEE ups its game

• Competency Models Made Easy - Two Simple Spreadsheets to Build Your Own Competency Models

• Simple (very simple) skill and competency models

• Individual - Team - Organizational use cases for skill and competency management

• Design decisions for developing a competency framework

• What is skill management? (this post)

• Competency models are living documents and need curation

• Some key use cases for competency model adoption

• Designing the Open Competency Model Architecture

• A third skillscape

• Building skill and competency models together

• Getting past competency model PTSD

• Co-creation of Competency Models for Customer Success and Pricing Excellence

• Competencies for Adaptation to Climate Change – An Interview with Dr. Robin Cox

• Architecting the Competencies for Adaptation to Climate Change Open Competency Model

• Introducing open competency models

• Integrating Skills and Competencies in the Talent Management Ecosystem

• Organizational values and competency models – survey results

• Why your job architecture needs a competency model

• Are values part of your competency model?

• How to build competency models

• A skill name is just a word, isn’t it?

• Current trends in skill and competency management

• Enabling internal mobility - a design thinking approach