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- There are no "Skills".
There are no "Skills".
Talking about having a “skill” is meaningless without context. A great “problem solver” in engineering is often unable to solve problems in sales or team management. What matters is how it is applied in a context.
Shourov Bhattacharya
July 12, 2024
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CEO Insight
There are no Skills, only Applied Skills.
 | “Talking about having a “skill” is meaningless without context. A great “problem solver” in engineering is often unable to solve problems in sales or team management. What matters is how it is applied in a context. - Shourov Bhattacharya, CEO |
When you do a lot of customer meetings every week, as we are starting to do, certain moments in conversations stand out.
This week, there is one phrase that stood out for me amongst all my founder sales meetings, given to me by our contact at a large Indian tech organization.
“Our hiring is not about skills,” he said, “but applying skills.”
Simple, but profound. 🤯
The way we think about skills is that they are abstract “attributes” that are “owned” by a person. You “have” the skill of problem solving, for example. You put it on your resume or even measure and credential it as a “thing”.
This is wrong.
Skills only exist when applied in a particular context.
A person might be great at “problem solving” in engineering. But given a particular sales context, or a team and people problem, he can’t solve problems at all.
Or maybe he can execute that “problem solving” within a corporate environment. But given similar problems in a fast-paced, stressful startup team, he can’t perform (this is a common example, BTW).
You need to see applied skills in the particular context of your organization’s work environment, process and culture.
Applying Problem Solving to a real job scenario
This is why it’s time to evolve way past the status quo of Myers-Briggs, psychometric testing, AI skills assessment and the like. All of these are based on the false assumption of “skills” existing in the abstract in some kind of ”testing” process.
The reality is, “skills” only exist when applied in your highly specific, customized context. Anything else is weak, uncorrelated data at best and, in the worst case, misleading and wasteful and incredibly risky (when you hire the wrong person).
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