Skills Development Matrix

Key Messages

• Employee Learning and Development include more than formal training
• Some methods are more appropriate for developing hard versus soft skills
• Some media are more appropriate for certain tasks but any medium that works, works!

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The Skills Development Options

The Skills Development Matrix looks at a variety of learning options and proposes a best fit for each in terms of their effectiveness and practice for teaching different skill types.  This assessment does not favor any type of media.

Structured versus Unstructured Learning

This identifies the level of organization of the content to be learned, its direct applicability to a specific task, the ease of transferability of the content into the job activity, and the existence of benchmarks of performance–whether they are graded according to industry standards or are subjective and based on internal measures. The more of these factors that are present, the more structured will be the method of learning.

At the other end, unstructured learning is social, associative, and experiential.  The learner must make sense of the activities seen and information acquired, often through discussion with a guide or a more senior peer.  The insights gained are also dependent on the level of simulation of the activities and the curiosity of the individual.  A highly curious employee can make the best of a dull situation; however, the opposite is not true: the most stimulating activity may fail to energize an uninterested and unmotivated person.  The value of informal training will be reflected in the employee’s ability to enrich the skills required for work from the experiences that have been gained.

Hard versus Soft Skills

This axis reflects learning that applies to a specific discipline or function (hard skills) versus those skills that apply across the board and help with relationship development and management (soft skills).  It is a mistake to think that the two are mutually exclusive; they complement each other highly.  Being very good at both is typically considered difficult however a focus on one at the expense of the other is often detrimental or compromising.  The matrix assumes a highly generalized model of tasks being aggregated into jobs and skills being the ability of a person to perform a job.

Media Independence

Regardless of the method chosen, a variety of media choices may apply to any of the methods.  As digital media gains prominence, expect it to be reflected in these activities, for example, increased use of video for coaching.  That may change the nature of what a method may look like but the fundamental issue is to remain aware of how the event impact skills.  Whereas webinars, recorded webinars, tech talks, conference calls and synchronous classroom may have been treated as somewhat different approaches only a few years ago, increased technological capability has caused a morphing of all of these into today’s standard online training capabilities.  Despite the technology gains, the distinction between a formal training session and looser coaching still remains.  Information access done synchronously (in real time) or asynchronously (at the user’s convenience) has become a normal part of the skills development landscape.