In our 3-part webinar series on the Ibbaka Talent platform, we covered some of the most important themes in skill management: Focusing Employee Development Conversations on Skills: How to Understand Skill Coverage for Key Roles in Your Organization: Agile Skill Management - How to Quickly Assess Capabilities Using Skills Frameworks. Recordings of these webinars are now available.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Data literacy is one of the central skill sets for 21st C work. But why? What are the goals for data literacy and what impact will it have? Karen Chiang looks at these questions as we begin a research program into data literacy.

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.

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.