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Skills intelligence for the people who build workforce strategy.
Need the definition, not the essay? The reference entries are short.
How to Choose Competency Management Software (Buyer's Guide)
Most competency management systems are bought after an audit finding, not before one. The auditor asks to see evidence that the person who ran a critical procedure last Tuesday was competent against the current revision of that procedure. The training manager produces a completion record from the LMS, dated two years ago, against a revision that has since changed twice. The finding is written. The corrective action says "implement a competency management process." The search for software begins
Sep 15 · 9 min
Skills Intelligence Platforms: The Buyer's Landscape in 2026
Five years ago "skills intelligence" was a phrase a handful of vendors used to describe themselves. Today it is a line item in the roadmap of every HCM suite, every learning platform, every talent marketplace, and a growing number of AI startups. Analyst firms now publish landscape reports on it. Boards ask about it. Procurement teams issue RFPs for it. Quick reference: Skills Intelligence Platform — the short version of this post, with the one table that matters. The result is a buying enviro
Sep 8 · 8 min
Skills Assessment: Methods, Tools, and How to Choose
Every organization already assesses skills. The manager who decides who gets the hard project is assessing. The team lead who signs off a new hire on the line is assessing. The partner who staffs a client engagement from memory is assessing. The problem is that none of it is written down in a form anyone else can use, compare, or defend six months later. Quick reference: Skills Assessment — the short version of this post, with the one table that matters. That informal layer works until it has
Sep 1 · 9 min
Job Roles and Job Architecture in a Skills-Based Organization
Ask a company how many job titles it has and the answer is usually a number that embarrasses someone. In 18 years of implementations we have routinely seen a title count that is a third of the headcount, sometimes higher. Titles multiply because they are cheap to create and expensive to reconcile, and because for years they were the only vocabulary HR had for describing work. Quick reference: Job Roles and Job Architecture — the short version of this post, with the one table that matters. Titl
Aug 25 · 9 min
Skills Inventory: What It Is and How to Build One That Stays Current
Every organization has a skills inventory. Most of them just don't know where it is. Quick reference: Skills Inventory — the short version of this post, with the one table that matters. It lives in the heads of a few senior managers who know that Priya is the only person who can run the chiller failover procedure, that two of the four welders certified on stainless left last spring, and that the analyst everyone routes Tableau questions to is on parental leave until November. When one of those
Aug 18 · 10 min
Proficiency Levels: Scales, Examples, and How to Define Them
Two maintenance technicians both have "hydraulic systems" on their skills record. One can swap a failed pump from a work order. The other can diagnose an intermittent pressure drop across a 40-valve manifold that has stumped the shift for a week. The record says the same thing about both of them. The scheduler, the training manager, and the succession plan all treat them as interchangeable, and every one of those decisions is wrong. Quick reference: Proficiency Levels — the short version of thi
Aug 11 · 9 min
What Are Skills? Types, Skill Sets, and How Organizations Map Them
Ask a plant manager what skills their maintenance crew has and you'll get a list of people. Ask the HR system and you'll get a list of job titles. Ask the LMS and you'll get a list of courses completed. None of those is a list of skills. This is the quiet problem underneath most workforce initiatives: everyone uses the word, and almost nobody in the building is working from the same definition. Quick reference: What Is a Skill? — the short version of this post, with the one table that matters.
Aug 4 · 9 min
Workforce Strategy Is Capability Planning, Not Headcount Planning
Sit through any board-level discussion of workforce and listen for the unit of measurement. It's almost always headcount. How many people do we have. How many are we hiring. How many are leaving. How many can we get to a new region by Q3. How many fewer can we run on next year. The CFO does the math in headcount because the budget is in headcount, the comp plans are in headcount, and headcount is the variable that fits cleanly on a spreadsheet. The problem is that headcount is the wrong unit f
Jul 28 · 6 min
Skills Currency vs. Skills Completion: Why "Trained" and "Current" Aren't the Same Word
A commercial pilot can hold a 737 type rating and not be legally allowed to fly a 737 today. Type rating says she's trained on the aircraft. Currency says she's flown three takeoffs and landings in the last 90 days. The first is permanent. The second decays. Aviation built its safety architecture around the difference fifty years ago and would never confuse the two. Medicine has the same distinction. Board certification proves the surgeon was once qualified. Active practice — case volume, proce
Jul 21 · 6 min
Why Your Engagement Survey is Disconnected From Every Talent Decision You Make
The annual engagement survey runs in March. Forty questions, fifteen demographic cuts, a board-deck readout in May, a senior leadership debrief in June. The "engagement score" moves three points, plus or minus. The slide deck goes into a shared drive. Mid-year reviews start, performance cycles spin up, succession plans get refreshed. None of those conversations references the survey results. This is the silent pattern in most engagement programs. The survey collects real signal — what employee
Jul 7 · 6 min
Resource Planning From a Skills Database, Not a Resume Spreadsheet: Where Services Firms Find Their Hidden Bench
The single most expensive sentence inside a professional services firm is "we don't have anyone available with that experience." It gets said in staffing meetings, in proposal reviews, in week-ahead resource calls. It usually means one of two things: the people who could do the work are already on other projects, or the people who could do the work aren't visible to the person doing the staffing. The first one is a real constraint. The second one is a data problem masquerading as a capacity pro
Jun 30 · 6 min