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.

Range by David Epstein and my son's high school graduation inspired this post. The focus is on how to make better choices early in one’s career path, or rather, that we should try to broaden our knowledge base and sample everything we can.

Ibbaka is conducting design research into the design of competency models or frameworks. In this post we summarize the approach of Jeff Griffiths. Jeff began his career in the military. He has thought deeply about how transversal (general) and vertical skills combine to create frameworks.

The second post summarizing a series of interviews Ibbaka has conducted with experiences competency model designers. This one is the the person leading the skill curation team at a major technology company. She applied design thinking to organizing the skill curation process, and found two quite different approaches in her organization: The Chunkers and the Slicers and Dicers!

Ibbaka is conducting design research into the design of competency models or frameworks. This is the first of a series of posts that summarize our interviews with leading practitioners. Learn about the diversity of approaches people are taking to competency model design. Competency models connect organizational goals to individual skills.

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?

Data literacy is not one big thing. Leading companies have developed clear personas that they use to guide the development of their data literacy capability. At Widen Collective, a Digital Asset Management company based in Madison WI, the three personas are the data consumer, the data discoverer and the data designer.

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.

Data literacy is one of the central skill sets for 21st C work. Data literacy depends on web of other skills. In this post Karen Chiang looks at the Ibbaka skill graph to see how the different skills connected to data literacy play together.

Product managers have hard choices to make. There are always more things that could be done than can be done. In this post Ibbaka product leader Kul Sharma shows a way to make these choices and applies them to talent management.

Any leadership survey will tell you that the priority of skilling and upskilling workforce is always top of mind. It is a given that people thrive in workplaces when they feel invested in. Yet, the connection between organizations prioritizing their talent and taking specific actions towards investments into talent development is often broken. As an organization, do you know when and how to best invest in your workforce?

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.

Asking good questions of the massive amounts of data your organization is collecting is a critical part of data literacy. How you formulate these questions impacts your ability to make good decisions that will drive value-generating outcomes. We go into this by looking at one of the critical questions in skill management. “Do we have the skills needed to realize our vision?”

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.