What does curiosity mean to you? Or leadership?
Skills can mean different things to different people. Clear skills definitions are recommended to accommodate nuances relevant to your organisation's goals and learners’ needs.
However, modern L&D realities also mean shaping your practices to consider tech like your learning systems, especially if you rely on your tech to deliver learning content.
Optimising skills definitions for your systems
In marketing, the practice of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is to optimise existing content, so search engines like Google can find it more easily. This involves using specific keywords and phrases relevant to the content and other techniques to make the content more visible and appealing to search engines.
While user experience should be the ultimate goal of any website, making sure that the content is discoverable by search engines should be a key consideration.
Defining skills should be considered the same way - your existing tech has limitations on understanding your needs. By specifying your skills in a way that is aligned with how your tech works, you’ll be better able to maximise the impact of your learning ecosystem. For example, with better-defined skills, you can tag more relevant content with these skills.
Template: A skills definition for your learning ecosystem
We’ve created a template that you can use to create a crystal clear skills definition for better alignment across your organisation, team, and learning ecosystem.
We recommend that for every skill, you fill out the following template:
- Description: 1 or 2 sentences
- Phrases: 3 or 4 phrases related to the skill
- Keywords: A list of up to 10 keywords
| 💡 Tip: You can use data from your learning systems to help find the right keywords, such as search terms users have used in your LXP. |
Let’s use Mentorship as an example to fill out this template.
Description: This should be as clearly defined as possible.
Mentorship is guiding and supporting others in their personal and professional growth. It involves providing advice, feedback, and insight to help mentees develop their skills and achieve their goals.
The 3 or 4 phrases should be related to the skill and provide an understanding of its nuances.
Coaching and feedback, giving career advice for professional growth, sponsorship and advocacy, guidance and support
The list of up to 10 keywords should be closely related to the skill and relevant to how it is understood in the context of the learning ecosystem.
guidance, support, advice, feedback, growth, development, counsel, goal-setting, sponsorship, relationships.
What you now have is a profile of a skill to dictate how your learning systems understand the skill with added clarity and shape your team’s understanding of the skill more nuancedly.
| MENTORSHIP | |
|---|---|
| Description | Mentorship is guiding and supporting others in their personal and professional growth. It involves providing advice, feedback, and insight to help mentees develop their skills and achieve their goals. |
| Phrases | Coaching and feedback, giving career advice for professional growth, sponsorship and advocacy, guidance and support |
| Keywords | guidance, support, advice, feedback, growth, development, counsel, goal-setting, sponsorship, relationships. |
Use the skills definition template above and our content curation brief template to streamline your curation efforts.
Tools for defining skills for your systems
If you find yourself at a loss on how to fill out the template, there are a few tools you can use so you’re not starting from a blank canvas.
- Relatedwords.org → This website will give you related words to a word or phrase instead of synonyms to give your skill definition better coverage.
- ChatGPT → Using AI assistance to generate alternative descriptions, phrases and keywords can speed up your efforts and ensure you’re using your resources more efficiently on editing and applying finesse instead of creating from scratch.
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TL;DR - Create a clear and concise definition of your key skills with our template to optimise your existing learning systems and make your content more discoverable. By using our template you'll also come to more nuanced definitions of the skills that your team can agree upon. |
