Skills Thoughts

"Skills" are the fundamental construct governing talent development and talent deployment. In this workspace IYS explores the challenges with skills and IYS's solutions to address them.

Skills is the currency of Human Capital.

When it comes to human resources or people there are two sets of information.

1. Information such as Degrees, Titles, Years of experience and compensation

2. Information on "skills" or capabilities, experience, competencies

Increasingly the 1st set of information is getting less relevant. Skills information is becoming more important.

It is what capabilities that we bring to the table no matter what our education or age or year of experience. The asset of organizations as well as that of countries is also reflective of the skills in the organization or country. While skills are important, it is not an information or data set that is easy to handle. In the coming sections we will explore the challenges with "skills" from a data or information angle. In the first section we discuss Issues with Skills. So what should we do to overcome the challenges with respect to the skills data. How can we start generating clean, and good quality data? IYS believes that there is need for a data set that is normalized on terminology, structured and standardized in the form of presentation, holistic covering all dimensions of "skills", includes proficiencies on skills and easy to manage - something like the report card we had in school. In line with this thinking, IYS has created, after years of research and development, a Skills and Occupations Taxonomy. It is not an aggregation of terms but a smart organization of terms that caters to the complexities of the skills space. In the 2nd section we will get into the details of the skills organization.