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?

According to the World Economic Forum, 50% of us will need some for of reskilling over the next five years! For this to happen, we need to understand the context, relevance and transferability of skills. This is Ibbaka Talent’s mission. We are currently conducting interviews with people who share our concern and passion. Reach out to us to learn more.

Skills and competencies are both important to capability development. Skills are the more fundamental and granular construct, competencies can be thought of as clusters of skills in the context of behaviors, activities or tasks. Should you be assessing skills or competencies? We look at the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

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.

Annual performance reviews are a thing of the past. The world is too fluid and performance too multidimensional for that. Understanding skills, providing feedback, enabling conversations has to happen real time. More than that, any assessment needs to be put in the context of current roles and the teams a person is working on. This is what Ibbaka does.

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.

Roger Martin’s strategic choice cascade has proven to be a powerful way to connect strategy to execution. The framework was popularized in his book with P&G CEO A.G. Lafley Playing to Win. This free, downloadable tool takes the basic strategic choice cascade and applies it to the strategic and tactical decisions made in talent.

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.

How neuroscience helps us to understand the connections between skills and behaviors. Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman has explained how changing behaviors is key to changing mood and even beliefs. Behaving in certain ways, like active listening, grows the skills needed to support the behavior. This is why behaviors can be such an important part of skill and competency models.