Describing skills so the words hold up

Almost every skills initiative starts at the wrong end. A platform is selected, a library of several thousand entries is imported, everyone self-rates on a five-point scale, and the resulting dataset turns out to measure confidence and job title rather than capability. The tooling was never the problem. The vocabulary was, along with the absence of anybody owning it.

This category is about the unglamorous groundwork: what a taxonomy has to contain before it can answer a question, how to define a level so that two people assessing the same person land in the same place, what counts as evidence, and how quickly a rating goes stale. These decisions are cheap to make well at the start and expensive to correct once a few thousand ratings depend on them.

For how this works in the product, the skills layer describes measurement and levels, employee skill assessment covers the evidence side, and gap analysis covers what the vocabulary is ultimately for.