Grouping and prioritizing skills into capabilities is not new. How do you ensure you get the full business benefits of skills management at your workplace?
Recently, HR and business analyst and educator Josh Bersin shared a video homing in on the value of taking a pragmatic, business-centered approach to skills. He advocates for a capability focus that resonates in the business world. It’s not a new concept, but it is a useful framework for grouping and prioritizing skills at work. What does Bersin have to say? And how do you ensure you get the full business benefits of skills management at your workplace?
Skills vs. Capabilities: What is the Difference?
Let’s start with Bersin’s definitions of skills and capabilities.
- Skills, he says, are the “technical, functional, or soft domains of expertise and ability that people own. They refer to specific abilities that people have and can demonstrate while performing their professional duties.”
- Capabilities are related to skills. Bersin defines capabilities as: “the business-oriented competencies that group skills into meaningful terms that are well recognized as criteria for success in a job or role. A sales capability may be ‘lead generation,’ which may require many granular skills (CRM systems, email composition, customer segmentation). Capabilities are bigger or more comprehensive than skills as they are developed through experience, real-world projects, and peer assessment.”
At Avilar, we similarly distinguish between skills and competencies.
- Skills are specific learned abilities. They are what a person can (or cannot) do. Writing a blog is a skill. So is computer programming, data entry, oral communication, and truck driving. Skills describe what activities employees are trained to perform.
- Competencies encompass skills, along with knowledge and behavior. They are how a person performs on the job. Someone can be competent at managing customer relationships, building teams and facilitating meetings. Well-defined competencies get to proficiency, describing cumulative knowledge, abilities, behavior, and expertise.
Whether you use the term capabilities or competencies, these higher-level “roll-ups” of skills and experiences tend to be the words and phrases that are used in everyday business language, effectively translating skills into the context of business.
Benefits of Skills Management Focused on Capabilities
Skills-based hiring. Skills-based career mobility. Skills-based development. All of these phrases have captured headlines in recent years and are driving many recruiting, onboarding, and learning and development initiatives today. The deliberate shift to put skills first has numerous benefits, including reducing bias and broadening talent pools as academic degrees take a back seat to skills. There is, and always will be, a need to validate skills across multiple professions – especially those tied to regulations and compliance.
However, a narrow focus on skills has the danger of falling into the “can’t see the forest through the trees” trap. Pursuit of growing each individual tree (skill) can get in the way of having a healthy forest (capability or competency set). When it comes to skills and capabilities, it’s most important to be proficient at the capabilities to do the job. Being proficient at a broad set of unprioritized skills won’t do the trick.
A focus on capabilities has several benefits:
- Stability: Capabilities are more static than skills. Over time, sales people will always need to effectively build relationships and close deals. A marketing professional will always be responsible for presenting product or service value to customers. A nurse will always need to care for patients. However, the skills – the specific technologies, tools, and tactics – to accomplish those essential tasks may dramatically change as new technologies and best practices emerge.
- Priority: Placing capabilities front and center helps employees, managers, HR personnel, and other leaders to better prioritize the skills needed to gain proficiency with the essential tasks and responsibilities of a job.
- Alignment: It’s a faster, straighter line from a business goal to a capability than to the many shifting skills that make up that capability.
- Buy-In: Since capabilities are typically terms used in everyday business language, it’s easier to get buy-in on capability development initiatives from business (not just HR) leaders. The business value is essentially built into the capability name, which eliminates the first hurdle of securing cross-functional engagement.
We’re big believers in harnessing skills and competencies (or capabilities) to address workforce and business issues. In fact, we’ve seen the most success in those businesses that implement their competency management program and skills-management software with their workforce issues in mind. Rallying around solving that issue or set of issues helps define what skills data is most important to capture and monitor over time – for the greatest business impact.
Start With the Business Challenge
Identifying your most critical business and workforce issues, first, has the added benefit of engaging cross-functional leaders from the start. Whether you do the exercise with your team alone or you bring in an outside party to facilitate the work, it’s important that every leader’s concerns are heard and valued. Only then will the team truly understand the company’s greatest pain points.
Once the issues are identified and prioritized, HR – with a capabilities-focused approach – can truly shine, helping to align the organization around the most essential capabilities. Here’s how:
- Baseline Data: With good baseline skills data managed in a robust skills management system (such as Avilar’s WebMentor Skills™), you can “roll up” the data for a capability view of the entire enterprise. Then, you and the team can see where your workforce is well-aligned to address the top business issues and where there are capability gaps.
- Capability Overlap: By looking at desired capabilities across the organization, you may find that multiple groups require some of the same capabilities. Which means, if there is a gap in one group in your organization, there may be overlooked individuals in other groups or departments that have enough targeted capability proficiency to fill those gaps. That’s a business win and, potentially, an employee career win for those who are interested in lateral moves along their career paths.
- Collaboration: When multiple teams are using the same or similar capability sets, you can help identify untapped opportunities for cross-team collaboration that would strengthen the company’s product or service development work, customer service, marketing, or other functional areas as adjacent teams share knowledge and perspectives then enlighten the collective contributions.
- Recruitment and Development: By shifting job descriptions, recruitment, and employee development activities to focus on capabilities, it will be easier to find and develop talented individuals who can do what you – and they – need to succeed. For example, instead of looking for marketers with strong writing skills, ask about ghost-written thought leadership articles that were accepted for publication. Instead of asking an accountant if they can do pivot tables, find out how they have improved the efficiency of a finance process. Also, focusing on capabilities may help to reveal better talent sources, once you identify jobs, roles, and industries that share the capabilities you’re looking for in your workforce.
In the end, getting the full business benefits of skills management may be about looking up, to see the group of skills making up the capabilities you care about the most. With that shared focus, your team will be aligned, engaged, and well-positioned to address your most pressing business issues.
If you are considering a capabilities-focused approach to skills management, download our Competency Management Toolkit for ideas on how to get started. Or contact us to see if Avilar’s WebMentor Skills™ can support your shift.
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