Basic and cross-functional skills.

Abstract

Throughout industry, government, and education, people are worried about worker skills. This concern with "skills," however they may be defined, is evident in a number of initiatives, including the 1990 Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) and the 1994 Congressionally mandated National Skill Standards Board. These new initiatives can be traced to the problems confronting workers as we enter the 21st century (Cascio, 1995; Howard, 1995a). N o longer can one go to school for 12 years, take a job, and then do much the same thing for the next 30 years. Instead, changes in technology, global competition, and the emergence of new organizational structures have created a dynamic workplace where people are confronted with a host of complex new duties and are asked to take responsibility for their own work and their own careers.These changes, indeed, stress the need for complex performance skills and ongoing skill development. This apparently straightforward statement, however, raises many more questions than it answers. How are we to define skills in the first place? Assuming we can define the skills of interest, how are we to identify the kinds of skills likely to be required on different jobs? What do these job skill requirements, in turn, tell us about how we should go about preparing people for the jobs of the future?In this chapter we hope to provide some initial answers to these and a number of other questions about occupational skill requirements. We begin by briefly reviewing what is known about occupational skills and proposing a working definition for them. Next, we propose a taxonomy of occupational skill requirements and a strategy for obtaining measures of the skill requirements of different occupations. Finally, we present some initial evidence bearing on the reliability and validity of these measures and examine its implications for answering certain questions about workforce skills.

The leadership skills strataplex: Leadership skill requirements across organizational levels

“…This skills domain represents a taxonomic approach to integrating decades of academic research on skills (Mumford, Peterson, & Childs, 1999;Peterson et al, 2001). As such, it is the most comprehensive skills model currently available.…”

Assessing Training Needs: Do Work Experience and Capability Matter?

“…Skill refers to an individual's procedural capacity to acquire and work with relevant information (Mumford, Peterson, & Childs, 1999). Skill proficiency refers to the demonstration of this procedural capacity compared against some specified or desired level.…”

Why Don't You Just Show Me? Performance interviews for skill‐based promotions

“…Given the need to model the growth across job levels in the promotional system, it is essential to identify the key tasks and knowledge and skill needed to successfully perform the tasks at each level . This is important because, ‘skills cannot be defined apart from some performance domain involving the acquisition and application of certain kinds of knowledge’ (Mumford, Peterson, & Childs, 1999, p. 50).…”