There are many ways how to organize large lists. They can be sorted in alphabetical order or, perhaps, by meaning. We use lists all the time. Nothing special about this, but alphabetical ordering is only possible in languages possessing an alphabet. Isn't that interesting? What about skills? How to organize them, and why?

If letters are shapes indicating sounds or voices, what are skills? A set of proxies describing an action or a desired outcome? When you think of a skill, what do you see? It is an abstract concept; as with anything abstract, the key to understanding it is the context in which the concept appears.

Sooner or later, everyone discovers what they are good at, what comes naturally, is effortless, and simultaneously provides a lot of satisfaction. That's Talent. What about Knowledge? Is it part of Talent, or does it exist independently? And Skills? Where and how do they fit in?

From an old toy to data curation, data organization, data collection and a few more thoughts in between. What our likes or dislikes say about us, and there is a way to predict what skills should land on a skill profile.

One of the biggest failings of many corporate competency frameworks is a lack of engagement with employees and managers. This is often due to lack of engagement with the ground truth of people’s work during the development of the model and a misalignment of goals around what these models should be used for. Try a bottom up approach to competency model development.

When acquiring a new skill, is the desire and a clear intention necessary for success? How about swimming? What other skills may we need to swim, especially in cold water, without wearing a wet suit? Breathing is the answer, and it is not only for swimming. Is the distance or time that matters when the temperature is 14ºC? What if it drops to 10ºC?

A well-organized list of skills, competencies, and behaviours will impress the recruiter and make the AI software that often does the initial scan through the applicants happy. It is a necessity. However, wouldn’t it be better to have a dynamic resume that changes along the career path? Skills can be arranged in many ways to tell a compelling story.

A quick dive into what value is. Defined as “the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something,” value can be found and approached in so many ways, sometimes totally unpredictable - like while searching for a quote and landing on a skill and talent management blog.

Apart from the new name—Ibbaka Talio—in the 14.6 release, we have included a new user management feature for corporate users. In addition, we have also opened the skill coverage tool along with the new Skill Bars, Skill and Learning Resources Cards and a detailed SkillRank™ and experience for each skill.

Branding can be a daunting and challenging experience. It may take a long time to get it right, but sometimes it takes just a few minutes. Guided by intuition, a gut feeling and a sense of what's right, it is immensely gratifying. Hence the story of Ibbaka Valio and Ibbaka Talio and how they came to be—a lighter take on a serious business decision.

Earlier this year (2022), Ibbaka deployed a survey to understand how leaders are gathering and using skill data in their organizations. Our key objective was to understand the types of goals that leaders have for leveraging skill data, as well as to understand what’s hard about gathering and analyzing skill data.

The value cycle defines how organizations create, communicate, deliver, document and capture value. It is generally used by companies for product marketing, sales, implementation and customer success. In role and skill analysis it is often useful to apply this at an individual level. Here is a simple template to apply value management at the individual level.

Product Led Growth (PLG) is a compelling growth model. Rather than pushing product through sales, in PLG the product does the selling. Successfully executing on PLG requires new roles and skills. In this post we look at the evolving roles and skills for PLG.

There is more than one way to upskill your team and close skill gaps. Here are the five key approaches: Move people into new roles; Have people share roles; Provide upskilling opportunities; Hire in new people; Outsource. A role coverage and skill gap analysis can give you insight into how to close skill gaps.

One of the most difficult critical skills to describe, and to develop skill in, is ‘Unlearning.’ In order to do something new we often need to unlearn what we think we already know. Unlearning is not only hard to describe, it is hard to do. We suggest a few techniques for unlearning that may be helpful.

Competency models, or given our focus at Ibbaka role and skill models, should not be static. They need to evolve in order to deliver constant improvement and to adapt to changing role design and skill requirements. The model, the data it organizes and the algorithms that deliver insights all evolve together.

Data graphs will change how organizations compete. In an open and connected world graphs that connect data in new ways will be the path to innovation. One of the most important data graphs will be the skill graph. It is through the skill graph with its ability to connect people that new services and business models become possible.

Role coverage and skill gap analysis relies on a role and competency model that maps roles in the work to the skills needed to execute on those roles. One question that often comes up is how granular the skills should be? We leverage some LinkedIn communities to help answer these questions and then looked at a practical example from our own business.

A skills gap analysis is used to identify the employee or team skill gaps through Self-assessments and Peer-assessments, whether qualitative or quantitative analysis. The objective of this process is to identify any discrepancies between the current skill level and the required or suggested.

Innovation was once an unusual activity. It is now part of many people’s daily work and experience. The skills needed for innovation are more important than ever. How will you support your organization in understanding, developing and applying these skills?