What are the critical questions we should be asking about skills as we enter 2022? How can we develop answers to these questions? In 2022, the ability to connect goals to skills and people (perhaps mediated by roles) will be critical to strategy execution.

Learning is a critical skill and reflecting on how we learn and how we can help others learn is an important part of work. In this post we introduce the Ibbaka Learning Journey Map. We this map when designing learning and for the activation and embedding of new capabilities. It is a concept blend of journey maps and learning theory.

What critical skills will matter most in 2022? What skills do you want to develop? What skills does your organization need? This survey asks about critical skills and puts them in the context of the business and thinking frameworks we will be using and major technology trends. The results will be published in late January.

The skill graph is sometimes seen as a normative representation of skills, a quasi official thing that is common across an organization or discipline. I am interested in a different approach, where each person's individual skill graph is as unique as their DNA and offers insight into their creativity.

Sometimes learning is seen as a solitary thing. People go into themselves, study and are tested. This is true of some people some of the time. But there are many people who are social learners and skills are most often applied in teams. Team learning is a critical part of capability development. Learn more about the Ibbaka approach to team learning.

Deep knowledge and specialization are an important part of expertise. But sometimes the expert knowledge acts like blinders. One of the best ways to overcome this is by combining ideas from different disciplines to come up with a new solution. This is the critical skill of ‘concept blending.’

Skills get connected to many different things. Part of the power of skill management comes from making and managing these connections. Skills connect to other skills, to people, to roles and to goals. Spend 15 minutes thinking about new ways you can connect your skills.

Competencies are often aligned to jobs and roles, or sometimes to tasks and activities. There is another way to align competencies with the organization and even with individual aspirations. That is to align skills and competencies with goals. Ask, what skills and competencies are needed to achieve goals.

Skills are becoming the new currency of talent management. The skills you have, how you are putting them to use, your potential are as important as relationships to shaping your career. Here are some simple things you can do to improve your personal skill management.

Skill differentiation highlights the differences between individuals, teams, companies and even geographies or industries. Industries in which innovation is common will show more skill differentiation. Industries going through commodification will see skill differentiation decrease. One of the risks of over reliance on competency models is that it can damp down skill differentiation. An open approach is needed to capture skill differentiation.

There are many reasons to infer skills from unstructured content. It is one way to seed skill profiles and to keep them current. It is also used in future skills research and in skill-based strategies, where finding skill differentiation is critical. In this post we look at some of the emerging best practices.

Josh Bersin is a thought leader in human capital management. As he was preparing his keynote for the upcoming HR Tech conference he identified key themes for talent going forward. One of these is skill taxonomy and intelligence platforms. Here are some thoughts on how this vision will be realized and what the business impact will be.

Competency models are often used by people in learning and development. The competency model is used to guide the curriculum and course design to ensure that the learning supports the desired competencies. There are similarities between approaches taken to designing learning, such as ADDIE and design thinking, and the design of competency models.

What is a skill profile? A visual way to show your skills and how you apply them. A skill profile can be for an individual, a team, an organization or a community. One can also have a skill profile for a role or job. Skill profiles represent who we are and what we can do. They are a good opportunity for design innovation.

Skill diversity is important at the individual, team and organizational levels. What do we mean by skill diversity? What value does diversity provide? How can we achieve it? Ibbaka Talent gives insights into skill diversity and a place to act to increase the skill diversity of individual, teams and organizations..

Reading is one of the most important foundational skills, but what does it really mean to be an expert or deep reader? Deep reading relies on a combination of immersion (related to flow), reflection and connection. One can learn to apply each of these enabling skills to improve one’s own reading.

Brandon Hall Group, a leading research firm in the talent and learning space, is currently conducting an important survey on How Do You Build Teams for the Future of Work? We plan to tag teams on our platform with different types of teams and see if there are any differences in skill patterns. What questions about skills and teams would you like to pose and see answered?

Sharing skills is at the centre of the Ibbaka Talent platform. Why is this? Other people often have a better understanding of our skills than we do. One may want to suggest a skill to a person for many reasons: because they have the skill; because they have the potential to develop the skill; because they need the skill on a team or for a role.

Sustained performance of any task at a high level requires flow. The total entry into what is being done.

The European Entrepreneurship Competence Framework (EntreComp) is gaining significant traction in Europe where it is being used to structure large scale training programs and to guide workforce development. We spoke with Margherita Bacigalupo about the approach she took to the design and development of this model and how her skill in UI and UX design helped her in this work.