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Skills intelligence for the people who build workforce strategy.
Need the definition, not the essay? The reference entries are short.
Promotion Workflows: How to Make Level Changes Run on Evidence Instead of Advocacy
Most promotions are decided in a room the candidate never enters. A manager makes a case, a skip-level asks whether the person is "operating at the next level," someone mentions budget, and someone else mentions the person promoted last cycle with a thinner case. The decision that comes out is defensible the way a jury verdict is defensible: people who were there can explain it. Nobody who was not there can check it. That is advocacy, and advocacy is the default whenever promotion criteria are
Oct 27 · 9 min
Introducing Journeys: Progression That Runs on Evidence
Ask how someone got promoted last quarter and you will get a story, not a record. The training was completed in the LMS. The practical sign-off lives in a manager's notebook. The certification is a PDF in an email. The approval happened in a meeting. The level change was typed into the HRIS three weeks later by someone who was not in the meeting. Five systems, one thread, and no single place where the sequence exists. That is why progression runs on advocacy. When the evidence is scattered, the
Sep 29 · 4 min
Your First Competency Framework in 30 Days: A Week-by-Week Plan
Every skills initiative starts with the same question: what skills actually matter here? Not the generic list from an HRIS vendor. The specific, measurable capabilities that define what good looks like in your organization, and what separates "meeting expectations" from "ready for the next level." The answer lives in a competency framework. The definition, the four build methods, and a worked example are in Competency Framework: How to Build One. This article is the other half: the project plan
Sep 22 · 9 min
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