Hiring/Growing: Skills vs Knowledge vs Abilities

That’s quite the title…

Sure, yes, there is a lot going on. But it’s all relevant, all important.

The first part; Hiring/Growing. It may not be super obvious, but all of these articles are categorised- Growing, hiring, exiting, paying, business. All to give you an idea of what part of the employee life-cycle we are talking about- the beginning, the middle, or the end. This article is relevant to both the beginning, and the end; the hiring and the growing.

The second part, Skills/knowledge/abilities, well that’s the bulk of the article, so let’s discuss.

Do they have the goods?

An underlying question of both growth and hiring is competence;  are they competent in what they need to be to do the job. What do we want people to be able to do so they can do this job.  When you dig deeper this gets complicated quickly, so let’s break it down.

KSAs vs competencies

In about the 1990s, it became for fashionable to think in terms of competencies that KSAs.  I’m not sure why, I’m not quite old enough to have been there at the time, but while competencies is a simpler and more efficient concept to work with, to my mind it oversimplifies, blending together ideas more useful when distinguished between.  By all means use competencies as a term, but it good to understand that there are different ideas bundled up in that catch-all phrase of ‘competence’.

Knowledge

What does the person know?  What is knowledge does the person have?  what information have they learn, embedded in their memory banks, and can recall to inform their actions?  This is a big area, with a number of different examples we can look at of how people have and apply knowledge in their jobs.  A carpet layer’s product knowledge is their understanding of the different product types of carpet and how to handle it properly, different methods of adhesives to get the carpet to bind to the floor.

Skills

Skills are different from knowledge, because it’s a capacity to execute a series of actions well.  A person is skilled when they are able execute a task, that someone with no experience would not be able to execute well.  Tasks can be simple to learn (e.g. slicing an apple), complex but everyone can do it (e.g driving a car), or highly complex requiring extensive and repeated practice (e.g. flying, juggling many balls). 

The distinction between knowledge and skills is important, and there are many examples.  Perhaps the best is driving a car; a teenage who has passed their driving theory test has all the knowledge to drive are car- they’ve learn the road code, and they been watching people drive their whole lives.  But they don’t have the skills; they’ve not learnt the muscle memory of how much press the brake, when to merge into traffic, how to scan for hazards.

It is often in this space that we see performance issues.  Employees who are not performing their job to the required standard are often not failing due to knowledge- unless we are expecting too much too soon, or they are not putting in the required effort to learn. Most of the time, performance is skills based- they aren’t able to execute the tasks they need to execute.  This is why performance requires training not teaching, and why performance management can be difficult and ambiguous- when should someone be up to speed on the skills required?

Abilities

Abilities is a more contentious area, with some people disregarding the category altogether, and while it’s not an idea we think of often, it worth knowing about.  The distinction between abilities and skills is a thin one, but abilities adds in two elements; natural aptitude and acquired proficiency.  A skill is the ability to do a task; ability is the capacity to do a bundle of skills in an area to a high level through a combination of natural talent and experience.  Most of us can drive, but professional drivers can drive very well.  I can hit a golf ball, but I have very little ability to play golf well.

How thinking KSAs helps us

So how do these distinctions help us?  Mostly importantly, they inform how gaps resolve themselves.  When recruiting, most of the time you don’t get candidates that just slot into the gap left by the last person, and when developing people, they have areas of required learning.

Knowledge has limited transferability but is easily gained

Understanding what is a knowledge gap versus a skills gap help you understand needs to happen. The knowledge required to be successful in a role is often highly contextual to the organisation, so little is brought in.  To demonstrate this, a newly promoted employee will have much more of the required knowledge than an externally employed employee, because they already know where to go, who to ask, what they are like, what it’s called, how many is enough.  But typically knowledge isn’t complicated, and everyone can learn that knowledge.

Skills have good transferability but is slowly gained

By contrast, skills move easily across organisations, departments, or jobs, but aren’t quickly and easily gained.  A skilled salesperson can sell anything (i.e. their skills are transferable) but they take a while learning the product and the market.  By contrast a promoted employee takes some time to get a skills to do the job- an employee promoted to supervisor will take years to learn the skills to be good at organizing people well.

How important are abilities?

The two sections above beg a question; if knowledge is easily picked up, and skills hard and unreliable to gain, why not just buy competencies (recruitment) instead of building our own (L&D).   this is where ability comes into it; most of the time it’s because we can see a natural aptitude, a talent within our staff to do the job well.  Sometimes we grow and develop people reactively- we need people to take on roles and fill gaps, so we move and promote people, but this is more development as a byproduct of business needs.  But where we develop intentionally and proactively, it’s because we see talent, we see opportunity, we see natural ability.