A few terms used in the shift to skills

- Now, before we go any further, let me just set some terms so that we all understand what we're talking about. The first is skills. We just talked about why it matters to your organization, but let's take a big step back and define skills in the context of the labor market. So the labor market we have today really is born to the industrial revolutions that started to hit about 250 years ago, and it's a labor market that was really trying to put people into jobs increasingly about goods and services from manufacturing to more recently the knowledge economy and intellectual labor and a lot of what has driven the labor market at a foundational level are what I call pedigree signals. So these are ways for employers to gut check whether someone is going to be able to do the job and can be trusted to grow at the organization. What we mean by pedigree signals are what degree do you have from what school? What current job title do you have at what employer? And what references do you have and what kind of network do you have? And is that an overlapping network with where I'm hiring? That's been at the foundation of the labor market for a couple of generations now, and it sort of worked when stability was what the labor market was delivering. People just got hired and they brought that degree, which was durable across their career, and they moved up to get the next job title and the next job title. Pedigree signals are less and less helpful in knowing if you've got the right person in the right job. Skills is what we want at that foundational level. It's really what opens up a meritocracy where you really notice someone had the skills, no matter how they've got it, no matter where they got it. If I can assess and they've got the skills, they can do the job. Now, once you're in a job, there's another big shift we're seeing, which is we really measure jobs by job titles. Everyone identifies themself by their job title. That's going to shift. More and more, we in the organizations we are in are going to have to identify the work we do by the tasks we do in that job. And once you shift from job title to tasks, you don't just see how jobs are going to start to blur together as functions start to blur in organizations that get flatter, but also how we can keep up with changes that are hitting our jobs year over year over year. Because as those tasks change, we can start to know, well, what are the skills I have and what are the skills I need for the new set of tasks in the job I'm doing?