Ibbaka has partnered with Learning Agents to create GoFrameworks. GoFrameworks is a place where Canadian businesses, government agencies and educational institutions can find skill and competency frameworks (or models) that can be aligned with badges and microcredentials.

Jessica Day from IdeaScale has helped many companies, governments and nonprofits introduce open innovation programs. We asked her about the skills needed for these programs and what organizations need to do to be successful with them.

Critical skills are, well, critical. A lot of Ibbaka’s work turns around identifying critical skills in different contexts. Identifying critical skills is a good start. But once you have identified them, how do you develop them? We investigate several strategies in this post.

Building community is central to Ibbaka’s values and we invite guest posts where people share their own experiences. In this post, Ashley Anderson shares how she has kept up artistic skills and why that is important to her career and at a personal level.

“Curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction brought her back.” Curiosity is an important behavior in a shifting and uncertain world. But is it a skill? Perhaps not. It is better described as an attitude. But there are important skills that support curiosity, and it is critical to many different business functions.

There is a lot of interest in skill and competency models bubbling up in Vancouver, BC. The innovation sector is growing rapidly and with this comes an interest in new skills and new ways to put skills to use. At the same time, the impact of climate change is a major concern and the adaptation to climate change competency model being developed by the Resilience by Design Lab at Royal Roads is being followed closely. Here are podcasts from Dennis Green and Steven Forth on these themes.

The atomic level of skill and competency models is sometimes referred to as KSA. The K is Knowledge and the S is Skills. What is the A? Depending on who you talk to, A is for Ability or Attitude or Attribute. At Ibbaka A is for Attitude. What does KSA mean for you?

Critical thinking has been identified as a critical skill in many different contexts. Just as important to design thinking is generative thinking, where new ideas are generated, opened up and explored. We spoke with design thinking thought leader GK vanPatter to get his insights into the importance of generative thinking.

Visual skills are important to many design disciplines. Are visual thinking skills and visual communication skills the same thing?

Some see competency definitions as the heart of competency frameworks. Ibbaka supports this in its Competency Modeling Environment, but our own approach is a bit different. Ibbaka dynamically assembles competency models or frameworks from data on roles, behaviors, skills and performance. Competency definitions are not always included. This gives more adaptive models that are better aligned with performance.

Skill and competency models often focus narrowly on what is needed for work or a profession. But this is too narrow a perspective. We are more than the skills we need for work, and the work that we do requires more than those skills. A holistic approach can reveal more or our potential and make it easier to find the people we need to be working with.

Skill and competency models are generally seen as an organizational tool. They are thought of as a way to organize information about skills and competencies and align them with the organization to support skill gap analysis or career pathing. As individuals take more control more their careers, skill and competency models can become more personalized and a tool fo individuals and teams.

Design research is used to get a deeper understanding of the different approaches that are taken to a design task. Skill and competency models are part of the designed world. Over the years Ibbaka has evolved its own approach to their design, which we update here.

Skills have been described as the new currency of business. Understanding skills has become an important skillset in its own right. One of the best ways to understand a person or a team’s skills is the skill interview. This is a structured approach that leads to a coded transcript that can be used in many ways in introducing skills.

It takes a community to drive innovation. Angie Schick and New Ventures BC are at the heart of the BC innovation community. We interviewed her to get insights into what makes that community tick and the skills needed for community building.

One way to get started with skill and competency management is to build a simple model for a basic competency and then use that model as a template for adding other models. This can work, but attention must be paid from this beginning to scalability and extensibility.

Designing a competency model can be daunting. There is so much information to locate and integrate, so many things to validate and get approved. Is there a better way forward? Ibbaka is using its skill AI to generate competency models. This reduces development costs and timelines while keeping the model dynamic and relevant.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has issued a new (January 2021) report on Building a Common Language for Skills at Work. They give the reasons as to why a global skill taxonomy is needed, propose and architecture and begin to define skills. Ibbaka will support this architecture on the Ibbaka Talent Platform.

Metaphors are central to how we understand the world and think about complex problems. Three metaphors that we apply to skill and competency models are the chemical, the evolutionary and the neural. Each of these provides its own insights and when combined can fuel innovation.

Job mobility will not be enough in a rapidly changing economy. We need to go beyond this to support career mobility. Dennis Green both exemplifies this in his own life and has thought deeply about the question. He shares his experience and ideas in this interview.