Podcast: What Is A Skills Taxonomy Anyway? Understanding The Market For SkillsTech | Josh Bersin

As skills continue to be an area of interest for many firms, this 30-minute podcast by Josh Bersin discusses how skills taxonomies are being used to organize and simplify skills information. Josh draws on essential distinctions between skills (which are more granular) and broader capabilities, which are a set of collectively used skills to solve business problems and challenges. For example, in Sales, the capability of objection handling—where a prospect presents a concern about the product/service a salesperson is selling—requires a salesperson to employ various skills such as listening, note-taking, and persuasion. Also, given that there are hundreds of thousands of skills, Josh mentions how specific technologies can help to simplify and infer employees’ skills based on various data points, such as resumes, Linked In, job descriptions, to name a few. Some of these technologies can also take skills information from workers and match them to open jobs and projects. Since skills impact virtually every people practice in business, this podcast is beneficial in understanding this topic on a deeper level—particularly linking skills and higher-level capabilities.