Feb 10 2022

Disconnected Skills Inventories

Skills, (and Awareness and Knowledge) are just one of many “Means to the Ends” of Performance (Process, or WorkStreams, or WorkFlow, etc.).

People just gotta have them (well enough) for the Process to produce Worthy Outputs that meet Stakeholder Requirements.

I wrote this originally as a comment to a CLO article I saw on LinkedIn last week.

***

Looking inward and beyond the industry’s fixation with ‘skills mapping’

Talent development’s focus on chasing 30,000 skills is enabling it to ignore other problems.

Matthew J. DanielJanuary 31, 2022

***

It was a good article – check it out here.

***

My perspective, after 42 years in T&D/L&D/LXD… is that Awareness and Knowledge and Skills in Formal Learning, in isolation from their authentic Performance Contexts, don’t Transfer back-to-the-job, and therefore don’t have a positive Impact on the Business Metrics – if those were even determined in the methods that many use to generate “lists” of enabling (but disconnected) Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills. This was generally (but not universally) true way back in 1979 when I joined the field.

I’ve been “Mapping Skills” back to the the Performance Requirements since those first days. Here is a 1984 Training Magazine article on that – and a 1984 NSPI (now ISPI) Journal article on it as well.

Performance-Based Curriculum Architecture Design via a Facilitated Group Process – 6 page PDF– published in Training Magazine in September 1984. –This was the first publication about Curriculum Architecture Design. Plus – the original manuscript (30 pages) – How to Build a Training Structure That Won’t Keep Burning Down.

Models and Matrices – 5 page PDF, published in NSPI’s (ISPI’s) Performance & Instruction Journal, November 1984 – This was the first publication of the Performance and Enabler Analysis methods for ISD using a Facilitated Group Process that I have been using since 1979 and as an ISD consultant starting in 1982.