Skills and Learning for 2023 - How I Plan
Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.
The change of year is a time many of us spend in reflection and making new resolutions. Some of those resolutions can be around the skills we want to build and put to work in the coming year.
Ibbaka Talio is a skill management platform that we use at Ibbaka to track our own skills, the skills of the people we work with, and how they are being applied.
At the beginning of each year, I use Valio to help me plan my learning in the coming year.
I use a simple process.
Reflect on the past year
Look for the skills I will need in the coming year
Choose target skills
Look for resources that can help me learn
Look for projects where I can apply the skills (sometimes I create a project just to have a place to apply a skill)
My full learning plan includes some things I do not normally share through Talio as it includes physical, relationship and dare I say spiritual goals as well as a detailed reading plan (I like books). At this time, I am using Talio for my work learning. For context, this was my skill map on Talio on December 31, 2022.
Reflect on the past year
At the end of 2022 I had seven target skills, skills I was working to develop and apply. This is what my target skills looked like on Talio.
Some thoughts on each of these targets and a subjective judgement on how well my learning is proceeding. Note that I gravitated to Foundational Skills as Target Skills in 2022. Foundational skills are the skills we use to build other skills.
Bayesian Networks (Technical) 3/5) This is the foundation technology for machine learning and artificial intelligence. I like to understand the basics. I am still a Learner on this skill, and will likely remain one for the rest of my life. I am using it on two teams so am finding some applications.
Semantic Technologies (Technical) 4/5 Another foundational technology, this is the world of RDF, OWL, ontologies and inference. Only using this on one team.
Graph Theory (Foundational) 4/5) The mathematical foundation for modern systems and the economy.
Choice Making (Foundational) 4/5)Hmmm, my SkillRank here is a 5, the system thinks I am a Guru. Choice making includes Roger Martin’s Strategic Choice Cascade and other Choice Structuring frameworks. I use this pretty much everyday, with customers, the team and in my own life.
Visual Thinking (Foundational) 3/5) Not my strength. But something I want to get better at. I don’t aspire to be a designer, but I want to be able to organize and explore ideas visually. Many of my blog posts have a sketch and I often work with Gregory Ronczewski on evolving these sketches.
Sketching (Foundational) 3/5 Meant to support visual thinking, but more concerned with the use of a pencil or markers on a white board. I need to spend more time sketching in order to develop this skill.
Look for the skills I will need in the coming year
My world changed a lot in 2022. I had to deal with a critical medical issue and took three months medical leave, Ibbaka’s business got more focussed, and the economic and technology environment I work in changed.
At present Ibabka is focussed on helping B2B SaaS companies in the cybersecurity, marketing automation and financial verticals achieve their key metrics: recurring revenue (MRR and ARR), Net Revenue Retention (NRR and NDR), customer lifetime value (LTV) and value to customer (V2C). This is one important input into my 2023 learning plan.
Another important input is the explosive growth in the capabilities and applications o large language models (LLM). The current popular examples are ChatGPT, Dall-E 2 (both from Open.ai) and Stable Diffusion, but there are many other models and applications. If ‘software is eating the world’ (Marc Andreessen) then AI is eating software. Clearly learning about and learning how to use LLMs will be important in 2023.
Finally, I have a long standing interest in pattern languages and how to develop and apply them. This may intersect with my interest in LLMs, that is something I need to explore. In 2023 I will be working on pattern languages for pricing, packaging software functionality and in skill patterns.
These are the three critical inputs into my choice of target skills for 2023.
Choose target skills
For 2023 my target skills fall into three groups.
Knowledge of industry verticals that I work in
Knowledge of cybersecurity
Knowledge of marketing automation or martech software
Knowledge of financial of fintech software
Large language models and how to use them
Knowledge of large language models (LLMs)
Design of prompts for LLMs
Prompt sequencing for LLMs
Design of pricing and software packaging
Development of pattern languages
Design of pricing models
Design of software packaging models
Nine skills. This is more than I generally want to target, but given the current pace of change I think all of these are critical to my work. Most of these skills are also new to Ibbaka Talio. This can be an advantage for me. I have the opportunity to participate in defining these skills and finding resources that can be used to develop them.
I have started to update Talio with my new target skills.
One of the next things I need to do is to identify resources and create some projects where I can apply these skills.
Look for resources that can help me learn
Resources come in many different forms. One of the most important is other people and communities of practice. When you want to learn a new skill ask
Who in my network already has this skill?
What communities do people with this skill participate in?
How is this skill being applied?
What teams or projects is this skill being used in?
Who are the experts for this skill?
How did these people become experts?
I am fortunate in that a close associate is deeply knowledgeable about artificial intelligence and how to build AI applications. Lee Iverson is the CTO of Ibbaka and I work with him on how to get meaning from data. Over the years Lee has been an important mentor and coach for me on all things data and AI and on how these connect to larger social concerns. (Gregory plays a similar role for design for me.)
Another emerging learning resource are the Large Language Models themselves, with ChatGPT being an excellent example.
Here are some ChatGPT prompts I am using to learn about ChatGPT.
What parameters are used in ChatGPT?
What other parameters could be used?
Are these parameters connected to each other?
How are parameters tuned?
What are tokens?
How are inputs tokenized?
How are tokens used to train large language models?
and so on …
Interacting with ChatGPT through a series of prompts that goes deeper into its answers, and branches off into associated areas, is a great way to learn. And one is learning two things at once. The domain you are interested in and how to construct prompts to get insights out of AIs based on Large Language Models.
Look for projects where I can apply these skills
Skills become meaningful when they are used. And in today’s world they are most often used with other people. So part of a learning plan includes who to learn with and how to apply the skills being learned. Some of these skills are going to be applied directly in work we are already doing. Other skills are worthy of their own project team. In 2023 we will have two such project teams.
Applications of Large Language Models and ChatGPT
A pattern language for pricing design (to make pricing modular, scalable and extensible)
Learning projects don’t need to be limited to your organization. I am working with my granddaughter on a collaborative novel The Enchanted Library where we are using ChatGPT to write the dialog for one of the characters.
What skills will you be developing in 2023?
2023 is going to be a year of massive change. We are all going to be developing new skills to help us adapt to and even shape this change. I hope you will be able to take some time think about your skills for 2023.
Reflect on the past year
Look for the skills you will need in the coming year
Choose target skills
Look for resources that can help you learn
Look for projects where you can apply the skills (sometimes I create a project just to have a place to apply a skill)
If you are interested in checking out Ibbaka Talio as a way to manage skills please contact us.
