Skills, Skills, Skills! upSKILLing! reSKILLing! All the skills!!

Hey Alison. A lot of what I've been seeing in relation to this trend of "skills- based jobs/learning" in both L&D and HR seems to be about shifting how work is done and how people's abilities to contribute can be assessed.

This HR-focused article has an interesting summary of what I've heard a lot about this topic. "A skills-based organization defines work by describing the tasks and activities that need to be performed to achieve set outcomes. Skills-based organizations deconstruct traditional roles and jobs and break them into smaller parts that describe the “work to be done”."

In an ideal world, that could lead to more job flexibility and better recognition of the multitude of ways people can build skills and demonstrate mastery of them. Of course, an ideal world and actual practice in the real world can vary from place to place.

From our perspective in L&D, that shift from a role-based approach to a skills one may change how we chunk up training content. And it would likely give us better data about our audience's current skills. But I don't think it would mean we would be asked to only focus on general skills and would skip domain-specific knowledge. It just might change how we frame some content. For instance, we might create a course on how to build effective e-learning rather than frame it as how to be a strong e-learning developer. And it could open up the potential audiences for our training beyond the roles that have traditionally taken certain courses.

That said, depending on where people work they may already be doing some of this at their organization already, even if they aren't calling their company a skills-based organization.

If you want to dig into the topic with people who have been working on it in-depth, Koreen Pagano has been playing in the skills-based training space for a long while now and may be worth a follow on LinkedIn. She also just put out a Learning Guild research paper on skills-based organizations that's worth a read.