Proposal for an assessment model of the congruence between people and work skills

Abstract

Rapid changes in the skill set needed in a profession make it easier to differentiate jobs and employment opportunities by the skills required. From this point of view, people's point of contact with organisations is their skills, not professions. Therefore, what matters is people's skills, competencies needed to get the job done, and people's potential in terms of skills development. In this sense, the present proposal aims to establish a framework to identify congruences between the skills mastered by people and the necessary skills in the work context and how to bridge the gap between them. For this purpose, a set of propositions are made: i) competences are the people’s point of contact with the organisation; ii) skills do not shape people, people shape their skills, iii) professions can be defined through associated skills, iv) people more easily acquire skills that are closer to those they already possess. Based on these premises, a skills model is postulated, which can be named Person-delivery Environment-work Context (PEC). This model is interested in the fluidity of a person's skills and the autonomy over the development of these skills. To put it into practice, this model needs the following five steps: i) identify the most common skills in the labour market, ii) classify the skills identified to make exploration possible, iii) identify the representation and frequency of a given skill in each profession and the labour market, iv) create a methodology for identifying and measuring personal skills, v) create a way to calculate proximity between the person's competences (P) and the work context (C). In the proposed model, there are two observable data: the existence of competence in the universe of the work context and the presence of competence in a person. It is expected that this model will make possible the identification of congruences between people and organisations and the skill development possibilities for a person. Some limitations can be listed, but the main one is that people and work are reduced to skills in this model. However, its applications can only be thought of as part of a broader career development process that considers people and their potential and the means of developing them, obtaining satisfaction, and having decent living and working conditions.

Keywords

• skills assessment
• model
• skills gaps
• career development
• upskilling
• reskilling