Understanding Skill Portfolios and The Components of Competency - A Management Primer

This morning, we’re going to continue our conversation around skill portfolios and developing skill inventories within your business. As I’ve looked back on previous posts, I noticed that we’re missing some key set-up logic and definitions.

Specifically, I see a lot of confusion around the definition of competency - especially as it relates to its application in education, learning, and talent management. The purpose of this muse is to define the word, identify its components, and prepare non-L&D professionals for the future of skills-based talent identification.

Work-Learn versus Learn-Work and the Reskilling Revolution

In this forum, I’ve talked a lot about the need to develop clearer signals of work readiness and pointed out the disconnect that exists between employers and educators regarding the preparedness of the workforce for the jobs of today and tomorrow. Specifically, I believe that skill portfolios that are validated through stackable credentials and supported through experiential “work-learn” apprenticeships will be commonplace and be just as important as the university degree is today in signaling work readiness.

As a hiring manager, you’ll need to be fluent in the language of competency as hiring for skills in lieu of degrees gains prevalence. 

Need convincing? A quick Google search for “hiring for skills not degrees” will yield a plethora of results from reputable sources on this trend. Don’t misunderstand - degrees will still be important to our future, but we’ve got to bring down the cost of an education, improve access to good jobs, increase the fidelity of work readiness signals, and make education more agile and just-in-time. 

Old “learn-to-work” models where a monolithic credential like the bachelor’s degree stands as a gateway to a good job must make way for more flexible “work-to-learn” pathways to employment.

Now do a quick search for “Reskilling Revolution,” and you’ll find a host of results that point to the estimation by The World Economic Forum and others that we’ll need to RESKILL up to a BILLION humans around the world by the early 2030s. Traditional learn-work models where humans cloister in academic settings to acquire competency for a new job simply won’t be able to keep up with demand. Work-learn models will be much more agile and efficient in helping the average human reskill as old skills are made redundant due to technological advances.

A Common Language for Skills

To accomplish the above, businesses, governments, and educational institutions will need to adopt a common language for skills. A common language for skills will help solve one of the challenges that has dogged the university degree for decades - comparability. In the current environment, as a hiring manager, how do I know that a degree of the same name from university X is comparable to that of university Y? How do I know that Suzie’s degree in discipline Z is the same as Billy’s from the same university? You don’t on both counts. You’re primarily relying on the BRAND value of the institution for signals of competency - not what the individual can actually do.

One more quick Google search for the “definition of competency” is in order to punch the point regarding how loosely the word “competency” is defined in popular literature. One article will call “communication” a skill and another will call it a competency. So which one is it? How can we expect laypeople and non-L&D personnel to understand skill portfolios and competency mapping if we can’t agree on the underlying definitions?

To help solve the confusion around competencies, the World Economic Forum is launching their SkillsLink Alliance and has published a Skills Taxonomy in an attempt to create a common language for skills and competencies around the world. For simplicity and consistency, I recommend the adoption of that framework as a starting point for skills and competency mapping within your business.

The Definitions

So let’s get to the definitions (source: Building a Common Language for Skills at Work, WEF, January 2021).

→ Competency: “A collection of skills, knowledge, attitudes, and abilities that enable an individual to perform a job role.” Examples include, leadership, teamwork, problem solving, and people development. Note that competencies are broad topical areas with numerous knowledge areas and skills necessary to develop fluency or expertise.

→ Skill: “A capability needed to complete a task.” Examples include, goal setting, time management, scheduling, numeracy, troubleshooting, data literacy, and financial acumen. Skills can be cross-functional or specialized to a specific role. Cross-functional skills are “shared” across competencies. Note the relative specificity of the examples of skills versus the examples cited for competency above.

→ Knowledge: “The body of facts, principles, and theories that are related to a field of work or study.” Knowledge can be practical and/or theoretical. Knowledge underpins skills and is a necessary condition to understand the ‘how and why’ behind a skill or competency. Note that both skills and knowledge are teachable and learned.

→ Attitudes: “Learned behaviors, emotional intelligence traits and beliefs that individuals exhibit that influence their approach to ideas, persons, and situations.” Examples include, self management, attention to detail, stress tolerance, mental agility, and civic responsibility. There is significant debate surrounding whether attitudes can be taught and learned. While some attitudinal characteristics are ‘hard wired’ and immutable, I believe that “tigers can change their stripes” or “old dogs can learn new tricks.” For example, with the right coaching, mentoring, and environment; mental agility can be improved through time.

→ Abilities: “Possession of the physical, psychomotor, cognitive, and sensory means to perform a job.” This definition is plain. If the job is NFL quarterback, it would be impossible (using today’s technology) for someone who is blind to perform the role.

→ Taxonomy: A taxonomy is a classification or structure. In learning and education, Bloom’s Taxonomy is likely the most well-known. The foundation for Bloom’s Taxonomy Revised is ‘remembering’ (meaning the regurgitation of facts), with ‘understanding’ as the next level up. As an individual progresses up Bloom’s taxonomy, depth of knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge increases.

→ Ontology and Knowledge Graphs: You’ll also hear learning professionals toss around words like ontology and knowledge graphs. It’s likely that you’ve heard them before and started tuning out of the conversation because of how foreign they sound. What’s important for the managerial layperson to understand is that these terms help describe the interrelation between knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitudes (the components of competencies) across competencies, jobs, job classes, and the human capital map of the entire company. For example, the skill of ‘numeracy' will show up as a baseline skill for many job classes across the organization (it is a cross-functional or shared skill). Likewise, the competency of ‘problem solving’ is shared across many job roles. 

What you end up with is a multi-dimensional graph that shows how the individual components of competency are shared across competencies/jobs and how “close” one job is to another. It is this concept of “closeness” that many vendors and geopolitical organizations use to calculate the “distance” between Job A and Job B and the amount of upskilling or reskilling that’s necessary to close the gap or help an individual acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to move from Job A to Job B.

As you contemplate the definitions above, note that each item lies on a gradient. Gradients can range from the simplistic to the complex. Most commonly, you see a three level ranking system like ‘basic, intermediate, advanced.’ The Lumina Foundation created an eight level gradient system in their “Connecting Credentials” framework back in 2015.

Conclusion

So, can a skill be a competency? Maybe, depending on how broadly the skill is defined. However, skills are definitely contained in the set of competencies. Can knowledge be a skill? In my opinion, no. Knowledge is the what and the why, whereas skill is the how and depends on acquisition of the what/why?

There’s a lot more to this conversation - specifically how to bring the concept of skill portfolios, skill taxonomies, and knowledge graphs to life in your organization. For now, we’ve brought you up to speed on the terminology and achieved the goal of outlining a desired future state where the university degree (learn-work) is not the only/primary gateway into a professional career and where skill portfolios, apprenticeships, and stacks of short, sharp, validated credentials (work-learn) provide means for alternative pathways into the world of work.

Finally, to get the conversation started in your organization, pull a few job descriptions out of the filing cabinet, dust them off, and ask “why does it say ‘bachelor's degree required’”? Ask why as many times as you need to get to the root cause and determine the true underlying set of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and abilities that are necessary to perform the role. Then start work with your HR and learning business partners on developing alternative pathways into that job.

Much, much more to come…

Andy