We are more than our work skills

Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.

Skill and competency models are primarily caught up in the world of work. They are used to connect skills to jobs and roles (whether these be job roles, team roles or ad-hoc roles), to connect work to learning, and ideally to triangulate all three.

Is this enough? We are more than what we do at work, and more importantly, the work that we do has the potential to engage more than just a narrow view of our skills and roles. Learning is not just training.

I have been thinking about this as I work on my personal competency model. These models are an experiment that a few people at Ibbaka are engaged in (see Should you have a personal competency model?). I started with the roles that I play or aspire to play.

These look different than the roles my company would assign to me, or even the roles I might pick up from external competency models. But they all contribute to how I work and whatever value I bring to other people. They rely on skills that are not (yet) in my skill profile.

Our lives are much wider than our work and we bring skills from outside work into the work environment, or at least we should, and good companies need to support and take advantage of this. Our work is inside our life, not something apart from it, as working from home through the Covid pandemic has reinforced.

I was reminded of this again in discussions of how to use badges and micro-credentials to support people from outside the formal education system find skills. Many of these people play important roles in their communities. They may be organizers, connectors, healers, or the person you call on when you need help to get something done. These roles all require a rich set of skills that often go unrecognized. We need to find better ways to support them and to help people leverage their community skills in the workplace and vice versa. In this way more and more people will be able to participate fully in the economy and the economy will become a better support for communities.

As an April theme, I will be asking people what skills they have developed outside work that are helping in their work lives, and vice versa. If you have any stories you can share about this, please send them to me at steven@ibbaka.com.