Many of us have added developing skills to work with ChatGPT (Open.ai’s conversational interface to its Large Language Model GPT). What are these skills? How can we develop them. Here is the approach we are using at Ibbaka.

What skills will you need in 2023? How will you develop those skills in 2023? Begin with a plan. My own planning process begins with identifying my aspirations, then specifying target skills that I want to develop. I track these in Ibbaka Talio. I go on to find learning resources and look for ways to put these skills to use.

Most knowledge workers will be collaborating with AIs like Open.ai’s ChatGPT in 2023. What skills will we need to work with these tools? We asked ChatGPT and then ran the results through the Ibbaka Valio skill extraction engine.

If skills are the currency of the new workforce than competencies and competency frameworks are how these get organized and connected to jobs and roles. The IEEE has published a Recommended Practice for defining competencies. Ibbaka contributed to this work and implements it through Ibbaka Talio.

The value cycle defines how organizations create, communicate, deliver, document and capture value. It is generally used by companies for product marketing, sales, implementation and customer success. In role and skill analysis it is often useful to apply this at an individual level. Here is a simple template to apply value management at the individual level.

Product Led Growth (PLG) is a compelling growth model. Rather than pushing product through sales, in PLG the product does the selling. Successfully executing on PLG requires new roles and skills. In this post we look at the evolving roles and skills for PLG.

There is more than one way to upskill your team and close skill gaps. Here are the five key approaches: Move people into new roles; Have people share roles; Provide upskilling opportunities; Hire in new people; Outsource. A role coverage and skill gap analysis can give you insight into how to close skill gaps.

One of the most difficult critical skills to describe, and to develop skill in, is ‘Unlearning.’ In order to do something new we often need to unlearn what we think we already know. Unlearning is not only hard to describe, it is hard to do. We suggest a few techniques for unlearning that may be helpful.

Competency models, or given our focus at Ibbaka role and skill models, should not be static. They need to evolve in order to deliver constant improvement and to adapt to changing role design and skill requirements. The model, the data it organizes and the algorithms that deliver insights all evolve together.

Data graphs will change how organizations compete. In an open and connected world graphs that connect data in new ways will be the path to innovation. One of the most important data graphs will be the skill graph. It is through the skill graph with its ability to connect people that new services and business models become possible.

Role coverage and skill gap analysis relies on a role and competency model that maps roles in the work to the skills needed to execute on those roles. One question that often comes up is how granular the skills should be? We leverage some LinkedIn communities to help answer these questions and then looked at a practical example from our own business.

Innovation was once an unusual activity. It is now part of many people’s daily work and experience. The skills needed for innovation are more important than ever. How will you support your organization in understanding, developing and applying these skills?

Role coverage and skill gap analysis are a key business process that materially improves success in achieving goals and introducing new capabilities. Ibbaka has a simple solution for this process that provides immediate insights for individuals and managers. Skill surveys are not a once and done thing. Make a habit of skill surveys to see trends and test the impact of interventions.

Value-based pricing and value-based selling are key growth strategies and are especially important when it comes to introducing innovations. What are the common roles in value-based pricing? What skills are needed by these roles? If you are introducing value based approaches, you should test your role coverage and see if you have skill gaps.

Core Concepts: Skill. Skills are the atomic element of skill management. They are the most general concept and are aggregated and connected in many different ways. Skills are based on the application of knowledge, in the appropriate context and are often supported by muscle memory and unconscious connections.

Ibbaka collects competency frameworks of all sorts for reference. We want to see if we can represent them properly in our skill management system and see if they contain skills we should add to our skill graph. GreenComp: The European Sustainable Competence Framework is a set of twelve competencies developed by the European Union to support the development of sustainable societies and organizations.

Ibbaka supports the Design Thinking Group on LinkedIn. We take a design thinking approach to our work on skill and competency models and to value-based pricing and customer value management. The group has grown steadily through the pandemic and now has more than 185,000 members. Let’s see where these people come from.

Work on IEEE 1484.40.2 Defining Competencies is nearing completion. Eric Shepherd has shared an excellent presentation The Value of Competency Definitions and Frameworks. We share a few slides here and connect it to Ibbaka’s work in this area.

Ibbaka periodically conducts surveys on critical skills. Our most recent survey was in January 2022. In this post we share some preliminary results and note what others are finding in related work. The full report will come in mid February.

How can we achieve our 2022 goals? A focus on process and metrics will not be enough. We also need to make sure that our people have the skills needed to perform in their roles and that we have built the connections between people, roles, skills and the goals we want to achieve.