Atomic skill mapping: revolution in continuing vocational training

Skill Mapping: What Google Maps Can Tell Us About the Future of Skill Development

I recently looked at a photo album from my family's summer vacations when I was still young. We always went to the south of France. If you've been there before, you probably know: It's almost impossible to visit France without being somehow forced to use the motorways around Paris. We've always lost our way. I was still quite young, but I clearly remember the endless piles of paper cards in our passenger seat: each card with a different resolution, a different purpose, a different notation, and by a different author. Often we couldn't even find our way around the map, let alone know where we were going or where we needed to get off. I slept most of my time and I don't know anymore how my parents pulled it off, but I'm sure I spent dozens of hours of my young life wandering around on Parisian motorways...

Just 20 years later, life (and travel) has changed radically. Modern map and navigation systems have triggered a massive revolution and changed the way we move from one place to another. Paper maps suddenly disappeared and three revolutions took place almost simultaneously:

1. One Mapping revolution (Introduction of digital maps with a completely new level of detail).
2. One Positioning revolution (Introduction of GPS, which determines the position to within a few meters instead of looking for road signs).
3. One Navigation revolution (which allows you to get tailored, personalized instructions; and even choose the mode of transportation).

What would we do today without Google Maps? There are some breakthrough innovations that we now take for granted so much that we can't remember how we lived without them.

The next mapping revolution is about skills

In the next 5 years, we will see a new but very similar mapping revolution. It will be just as groundbreaking. But this time, the mapping revolution won't be about traffic. It will be about learning and education.

It will be the skill mapping revolution

Today, many talent, L&D, and skill management functions still navigate the same way my family navigated Paris using paper maps 20 years ago: without guidance, at an incorrect level of detail, without knowing your own position, and with inconsistent, incompatible definitions of what a skill is (and how it differs from competencies). Yet the need for advanced skill maps and a notation for structuring skills in companies is greater than ever before.

But why?

• For a strategic skill and talent management Good skill maps are required. “Do we have the right skills to be competitive and successful in the digital age?” is the key question that is at the top of every CEO's agenda today.
• To the Empowering employees through the endless jungle of learning opportunities To point out, you need good skill maps. How can I learn effectively if I don't know how the learning activities relate to my goals? (“Am I heading east or west to reach the Eiffel Tower?”)
• Good skill maps are needed to the next generation of Skill assessments to enable. To use the Google Maps metaphor again: If you don't have a good map, your GPS location wouldn't be very helpful, would it? The smartest companies are already using AI-based assessments to precisely position employees (for recruitment, learning, and strategic competence management) on their skill map.
• Good skill maps are necessary to internal mobility to enable . Work requirements are changing faster than ever before. If you're unable to adapt your employees' skills to new tasks and projects, you're missing out on great opportunities. Or worse, your employees will leave the company.
• Good skill maps are a prerequisite for Next generation of skill intelligence. They are the basis for insights into your competitors' skills and for staying ahead of your competitors' skills.
• Good skill maps are needed to enable skill-based reporting, which finally enables meaningful attribution of learning to measurable business results. (“How far did we walk through Paris today, and was that the fastest route?”).

In short, a skill map of your company is the fundamental element for people development. It is the decisive step for everything that comes next.

So what are companies doing wrong?

Most skill taxonomies and competency maps are faulty

In recent years, some institutions have collected huge databases of skills and combined them into skill taxonomies. However, upon closer examination, one can only conclude that these taxonomies are fundamentally flawed and cannot be used to guide learning and development.

The core problem with existing skill maps is that no recommendations for action for learning and development can be derived.

It's like trying to find your way around the Parisian motorways with a map that only shows cycle paths.

Not exactly the best idea, is it?

A higher-level map is like a city map without street names.

Today, most companies are already using their competency models. Some are in Excel, others are already more deeply integrated into their HR systems. Can't we call that a skill map?

No

There are fundamental differences between competencies and skills. Skills are a great tool for reflecting actual behavior (for example, for performance management), but they can't be used to connect people to learning. Nonetheless, your skill map is an excellent basis for creating your first skill map!

Almost every company I've talked to in the last few months is slowly starting to create a skill map, and we often help connect it to existing competency models. A typical skill map has a number of general dimensions that include both general skills (e.g. soft skills, IT tool skills, etc.) as well as organization-specific skills (e.g. operating the production machine XY). Sometimes these are divided into one or two additional levels of detail (e.g., “IT tool skills” are divided into “Microsoft Office” and these in turn into “Excel” and “PowerPoint”). This type of high-level skill map is a great tool for formulating your skill strategy (e.g. “everyone should know Excel,” “we need more skills in Dimension X and less in Dimension Y”).

However, what 90% of companies miss here is the connection between the strategic level and the provision of learning content. The skill map remains at a level that cannot be implemented by individual employees. The skills are often just keywords. It's like a map without a street name: it's impossible to tell where you are. And it certainly doesn't help you find your way around Paris. Employees and management are groping in the dark. They're drowning in content that's only loosely related to the keywords they've defined on a strategic level (just try searching for “data analysis capabilities” on a platform of your choice...).

Imagine that you want to improve your Excel skills because Excel is somewhere on your employer's skill map. Of course, you already know a bit about Excel; your resume says “intermediate Excel skills.” The problem is that there are literally thousands of online courses for “intermediate Excel skills”!

So which one do you choose?

Half of the courses start with skills you already have, you get bored and drop out. The other half starts a bit too far ahead, you're missing some basics about pivot tables, and again: you drop out. It's no surprise that the completion rate for courses offered by companies' learning and development departments is less than 5%.

Introducing Atomic Learning: A New Generation of Skill Maps

What employees and companies alike need is a new generation of skill mapping systems. A map where they can literally zoom out (for strategic skill development issues) and zoom in (for specific skill assessments and finding the next skill you'd like to learn during your 30-minute lunch break). It is more detailed and actionable for learning and development than anything we know today.

When we investigated this question with our team at edyoucated, we were surprised that we couldn't find a single solution on the market that met these criteria. All solutions remain at a superficial skill level, which makes it impossible to translate them into individual learning paths. Of course, we didn't want to build our learning paths based on incomplete skill maps.

So we had to develop a new system for recording skills and competencies ourselves.

We developed this dynamic skill mapping system based on a basic paradigm that we call atomic learning (it is closely related to the idea of mastership-based learning but expands on it with a few additional elements and concepts). The basic idea of atomic learning is to break down a specific topic step by step into its elementary building blocks, the smallest units of knowledge that can be learned individually (therefore they are called “atoms”). Like the small LEGO building blocks that you might know from your childhood. A simple example of such an atom would be the “sum formula in Microsoft Excel.” It's clear that these skills can hardly be broken down further — and that's great, because it allows you to instantly connect them to small learning materials and provide highly personalized learning experiences! Of course, every atom can have certain requirements: For example, to understand the “sum formula in Microsoft Excel,” you may have to “open a workbook in Microsoft Excel.”

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Sounds like a lot of effort?

But it isn't!

In the next section, I'll show you how to get started with your first skill map.

Do I need to create my own atomic skill map?

Of course, you wouldn't build your own skill map from scratch. For some specific use cases, you could take full advantage of defining your own atoms and combine them into your own skill map. But I promise you that won't be the case for most applications in your company. I would therefore recommend that you start with a standard skill map for general skills that you can use from day one without having to put in any additional effort.

From there, the teams we work with do two things:

1. They link the skill map with their existing competency models so that it can really be implemented for personnel development (e.g. the competence “leading an agile team” corresponds to a range of leadership and agile skills in the system).
2. They start with a first prototype and then gradually expand the map with their own skills tailored to their needs.

There are a number of providers today, and I believe that we will see many more such out-of-the-box skill maps in the future (at edyoucated, our taxonomy includes several thousand skills on topics such as digital transformation, soft skills, leadership and many more). Make sure you really review potential skill maps in detail. Make sure you can expand it and break it down to the atomic level where it makes sense. If they stop using “Microsoft Excel,” you won't be able to create personalized learning paths for your employees.

Now on to practical applications. Let's start with the two most important use cases that show how companies are using these atomic skill maps in practice today (we'll show you a few more use cases in later blog posts)

Use case 1: Atomic learning meets skill assessments

For the first time in history, Atomic Skill Maps allow people (and learning platforms) to define their skills at a whole new level of detail. Here, too, it is similar to the revolution that brought GPS for positioning on a map: Today, it is very likely that your smartphone can precisely locate you within a radius of just a few meters, isn't it? But not too long ago, you had to find your location in Paris on the map yourself.

The same is happening now with learning. If you start training in a few years without knowing exactly your previous skill level (at the atomic level), it will be like someone telling you that they navigate with paper maps.

With intelligent assessment systems based on atomic skill maps, employees receive an accurate skill profile within a few minutes, which transparently shows all skills they have already mastered. And also the skills they should further develop in order to be ready for a new project or a completely new role within the company. If you want to learn more about how skill assessments work at edyoucated, read our article about skill assessments. And if you're really in the mood for data science, we recommend our Blog about the data science behind skill assessments.

Use case 2: Help your learners find the best path

But a skill assessment is usually just a means to an end. After all, we want to develop people and provide them with the right skills, learning materials and help just when they need them. We want to deliver tailored learning content that fits their goals, previous knowledge and learning style.

Unfortunately, most online courses these days are just a huge black box. When you open your proprietary learning platform and search for “Excel” or “data analysis,” you usually see that students receive dozens (sometimes thousands) of course results and are completely overwhelmed with choosing the right course. And even if they've started a course, the information about which skills it actually teaches is completely lost after completing the course, as most providers don't return the information to a central skill map and your personal skill profile.

Here, too, atomic skill maps are redefining the way learning works today. That's because you can actually assign individual learning materials, quizzes, training (and anything else you can think of) to individual skill atoms. And as soon as you have identified the competency gaps of individual employees, intelligent learning platforms automatically determine which materials are perfectly suited to effectively impart this competence. The clients we work with today saw a drastic increase in learner engagement and were able to use their time 40% more effectively on average (as around 40% of the content they already know was “personalized away” to make room for new and more relevant learning activities). Again with the help of ready-to-use atomic skill cards, which were set up without additional resources on the part of L&D.

The future is: Skills

I hope this post gave you a good overview of the key concept, benefits, and use cases of Atomic Skill Maps. Of course, you could write an entire book about it. It's a fast-growing, exciting topic, and many companies, from SMEs to large corporations, are just starting to address it. So we're still at the very beginning. Over the next few months, we'll show you how some of the most successful companies have used atomic skill maps to drastically improve their continuing education efforts. How does your company use skills and skill maps today? Are you curious to learn more about successful use cases and skill transformations? We've already helped many customers implement skill-based learning to make their continuing education more engaging, effective, and measurable. If you would like more information, I would be happy to help.