There is often confusion around the definition of skills and competencies. Are these different words for the same thing or do they refer to different things with different uses. The IEEE 1484.20 Defining Competencies standard is a work in progress, but progress is being made on shared definitions for critical terms.

Brian Conlin has been an important advisor to Ibbaka Talent. As the former CEO of Golder Associates and a CEO coach himself he brings deep insight into the skills needed for success at employee owned enterprises.

Thealzel Lee is a connector, not just in the Vancouver innovation ecosystem, but between the fo-profit and non-profit sectors. She brings a richly diverse life experience to her work in innovation. One of her key insights is how silos are coming together in many ways to drive positive change.

Talent will move to the front in 2021 strategic planning. What are the critical questions to ask as you prepare your 2021 talent strategy?

Pieter Dorsman is a catalyst for the innovation economy in British Columbia. Over the past two decades he has made a major contribution to making innovation part of Vancouver’s culture. In this interview he talks about the importance of building a board for early and growth stage companies that acts like a team.

There are emerging best practices in how to design and role out capability management systems that leverage skill and competency models. We summarize some of what we are learning in this presentation.

Jennifer Rogers is one of the leading practitioners of skill and competency management, having led roll outs for major companies in the energy and resource sector and having worked as a learning and development consultant. We interviewed her to get her view on the state of the art and the impact that skill and competency management can have on the organizations and individuals.

In this post we give a practical example of how we developed a small competency model. The model is for Innovation Coaching. It will be of interest to everyone responsible for designing and managing competency models, and for people with a specific interest in innovation and coaching. We begin with some context on the Innovation Mentor Network that Ibbaka is supporting.

Olivier Aries has led change management, knowledge management and professional services at major consulting and product companies. In this wide ranging interview he talks about the skills needed for adaptation, the role of change management and some of the larger tensions in society that are shaping the future of work.

There are many reasons to assess skills. With those many reasons come a wonderful variety of different approaches. Ibbaka has opened a short survey to explore how and why levels of expertise get assessed and what is done with these assessments. Please share your insights.

Eric Shepherd and Martin Belton from the Talent Transformation Guild discuss open competency models, the resilience-adaptation-efficiency cycle and the future of work with Ibbaka Co-Founder Steven Forth.

Trade off triangles are a useful way to see and manage trade offs. In project management there is the classic Time-Quality-Cost triangle. Google uses the triangle of Capacity-Latency-Quality to optimize the search experience. Personally we need to trade off Health-Wealth-Time. Being able to recognize and then manage trade offs in design, business and personal life is a critical skill.

The IEEE is using user stories to inform the proposed IEEE P1484.20.2 Competency Model Definitions work. These user stories are using a format from Behavior Driven Development (BDD). If you have suggestions for user stories, or even the different actors, in skill and competency management, please share your ideas and we will bring them to the working group.

What form should IEEE guidance on competency model definitions take? Share your thoughts as the IEEE embarks on this important work. Ibbaka managing partner Steven Forth has joined this effort as the Vice Chair of IEEE 1484.20.2 Recommended Practice for Defining Competencies.

What skills do we need to understand the future? What skills will we need for the future? We reached out to Adi Yoffe, author of NEXT: A Manual for Disruption to get her insights into these important questions.

Competency models are the critical lens to see if the skills of your workforce align with your current and future needs. Ibbaka is committed to making it easy for you to build and apply competency. models. Here are two tools you can use, a simple one for your basic needs and one that you can use to design a full competency model. These are offered to you for free under a Creative Commons license.

On October 1st, workforce transformation guru Chuck Hamilton will join Karen Chiang and Steven Forth to discuss how we can rebuild our workforces so that they can be more resilient and more adaptive. Our fireside chat will be at Workforce Transformation Online. Preliminary results from the Ibbaka Skills for the Future of Work survey will be shared.

Sometimes a very simple model is all that is needed. And paring a model down to its essentials can reveal what really matters. Here are two simple approaches to a skill and competency model. For general behaviors, relevant across your organization, use just behaviors and skills. For new capabilities, that you want to cultivate, use roles and skills. If you want to connect these to learning and development, add learning resources.

Customer journey maps have become a key tool in customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) design work. They are one of the best ways to organize service designs. We recommend calling out trust as an explicit part of these maps. Trust and skill management are tightly connected. To succeed with skill management people have to trust the system, the data and, most importantly, each other.

Trust is the glue that lets us work together. It is a skill, a critical skill even? What other skills might trust depend on? What skills does trust enable? Can we help each other to learn how to trust?