40 terms
Skills glossary
The library
Adjacency
Two skills are adjacent when the distance from holding one to holding the other is short. The important detail, which many definitions drop, is that adjacency is a property of a person and a pair of skills together, not of the pair alone. Python and R are adjacent for a data analyst and not for a copywriter. Adjacency models that ignore who holds the starting skill produce retraining plans that look sensible and do not work.
Bench time
Bench time is the time a consultant spends unassigned to billable work between projects. Some is unavoidable. Long or frequent bench time usually means the firm cannot see early enough who is coming free and what they can do. It is one of the clearest numbers to tie a skills platform's business case to, because every bench day has a known cost.
Capability
A capability is something an organisation can do, assembled from skills, people, process, tools and accumulated practice. "We can deliver a regulated clinical trial in the Nordics" is a capability. "SQL" is a skill. The distinction matters commercially, because clients buy capabilities and individuals hold skills, and the gap between the two is where many bids are lost. A capability can be absent even if every skill it needs exists somewhere in the organisation.
Career path
A career path is a sequence of roles a person can move through, with the skills, levels and certificates each step requires. It is most useful when it shows the gap between where someone is and the next role, in their own terms, so the development plan follows from it. Paths can run sideways as well as upwards, and a move into an adjacent role is often the fastest way to grow.
Certification management
Certification management is tracking who holds which external certificates and licences, when each expires and the proof behind it, so an organisation can renew on time and show evidence to auditors, clients and partner programmes. In spreadsheets it fails at expiry dates and proof files. Done well, it alerts people before expiry, keeps a full change history and ties each certificate to the roles that require it. See certification tracking.
Competency
A competency is an observable standard of behaviour expected at a level, usually anchored to a role or a grade, and written to be assessed. "Manages senior stakeholder expectations in client-facing workshops" is a competency. It bundles skill, judgement and context, which makes it useful for progression and promotion decisions and awkward for search or for staffing a project.
Competency framework
A competency framework is the set of competencies an organisation expects, each described at several levels and usually tied to roles or grades, and used for hiring criteria, progression and assessment. It describes expected behaviour. It does not record who actually holds what, which is the job of a skills inventory. Frameworks age as roles change, so they last longer when they are built on a maintained skills taxonomy.
Competency matrix
A competency matrix maps roles against the competencies they require and the level of each. Where a skills matrix shows what people have, a competency matrix shows what roles need, and setting the two side by side shows the gap. In regulated industries it is often what an auditor asks to see under ISO 9001 Clause 7.2, together with the evidence that each person meets it.
Credential decay
Credential decay is a credential losing its currency: it expires, the standard it certified against is revised, or the issuing body's requirements change. It is not the same as skill decay, which is the ability itself degrading through disuse. The two run independently, and both matter. A person can be fully competent with a lapsed certificate, which is a compliance problem, or formally certified and out of practice, which is a delivery problem.
Human capital management (HCM)
Human capital management is the suite of HR software that runs the employee lifecycle, from core HR records and payroll to recruiting, performance, learning and compensation, as sold by Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle and others. HCM suites are the system of record for employment. Skills data inside them tends to stay thin, because employees rarely open their HR system to describe what they can do, which is why many organisations run a dedicated skills platform alongside.
Inferred skill
An inferred skill is one attributed to a person by a model reading proxies: job title, tenure, HRIS records, course completions, project assignments, public profiles. It carries a probability rather than a source. Inference is strong on role patterns and weak on individuals, because the proxies describe the seat rather than the person in it, and few vendors publish per-person accuracy figures. Ask for that number before you rely on the output.
Internal mobility
Internal mobility is people moving to different roles, projects or teams inside the same organisation, whether permanently or for a single engagement. It is usually measured as internal fill rate, the share of open roles filled from inside. The blocker is rarely appetite. It is that nobody can see who is capable of what, so hiring managers recruit externally because that is the only pool they can actually search.
Job architecture
Job architecture is the structure of an organisation's jobs: families, functions, levels and titles, often tied to pay bands. It tells you where a role sits. A skills-based job architecture adds the skills and levels each job requires, so roles can be compared, career paths drawn and internal moves planned on capability. Most organisations build it one role family at a time.
Key-person risk
Key-person risk is the exposure an organisation carries when a skill, certificate or piece of knowledge is held by only one person, or a very few, so a single resignation or illness stops work. It is also called the bus factor. A skills inventory makes it measurable: list every skill a critical service depends on and count how many people hold it at a working level.
Proficiency level
A proficiency level records how well a person holds a skill, on a defined scale, and it is what separates a skills record from a tag list. MuchSkills uses a 1 to 9 scale, with 1 to 3 beginner, 4 to 6 intermediate and 7 to 9 expert. Three points inside each band capture what a five-point scale loses: the difference between someone who can do the work and someone ready to lead it.
Reskilling
Reskilling is training someone for a different role, usually because their current role is shrinking or a new one is growing, such as moving a support engineer into security operations. It costs more and takes longer than upskilling, so the choice of who to reskill matters: people whose existing skills sit close to the new role get there sooner. Reskilling plans built on job titles alone often pick the wrong people.
Role profile
A role profile lists the skills, levels and certificates a role requires, split into must-haves and nice-to-haves. It turns a job description into something a system can compare people against, which makes gap analysis, career paths and internal hiring possible. A typical role profile holds 30 to 40 skills, more for technical roles that use many tools, with 10 to 15 marked as prioritised.
Self-reported skill
A self-reported skill is one entered and rated by the person who holds it. Its known weakness is bias in both directions: some people inflate, and quieter people understate. Its known strength is that the source is the only party with complete information, and it is the only input a person can be asked to keep current. Two corrections are common: making profiles visible to colleagues, so a claim sits where people who know the work can see it, and a manager's assessment alongside.
Skills assessment
A skills assessment is any method of establishing how well someone holds a skill: self-assessment, manager assessment, peer endorsement, a test, a certificate or observed work. Each method has a known bias and a known cost. Pairing a self-assessment with a manager's assessment is widely used because it is cheap to repeat, and the difference between the two ratings starts a useful conversation.
Skills audit
A skills audit is a point-in-time review of the skills an organisation, team or person holds against what it needs, usually to inform a restructuring, a strategy or a training budget. Its weakness is that it starts ageing the day it ends. Organisations that run audits repeatedly tend to move to a continuously maintained skills inventory, which answers the same questions at any time.
Skills gap analysis
A skills gap analysis compares required proficiency against current proficiency, per skill, per person or per team, and returns the difference. It is arithmetic. The analysis is the paragraph that follows it, which says what to do about each row: a four-point gap is not a short course, it is a mentor or an outside hire for the first project cycle. A gap table without that paragraph tells you nothing about what to do next.
Skills intelligence
Skills intelligence is the category label for software that collects skills data and turns it into decisions about hiring, staffing, development and planning. It is a loose term, used by vendors whose architectures have nothing in common: some infer skills from work systems, some run assessments, some ask employees. What matters is where its data comes from and who is accountable for keeping it true.
Skills inventory
A skills inventory is the actual holdings: which named people hold which skills, at what proficiency, right now. The taxonomy is the vocabulary; the inventory is what has been said using it. Organisations conflate the two constantly and it causes a specific failure, where a team spends four months building a taxonomy and reports that they have completed their skills inventory. They have completed the list of words, not the inventory itself.
Skills matrix
A skills matrix is a grid of people against skills, with proficiency in the cells. It is a view of the inventory rather than a separate thing, and its usual scope is a team or a role rather than an organisation. The traditional version is a spreadsheet, and the traditional failure is that it becomes an artefact nobody trusts: someone marked fully competent in a skill they have not used in two years, a certification that expired eight months ago still showing as current.
Skills ontology
A skills ontology is a taxonomy plus typed relationships between the skills in it: this skill requires that one, this is a specialisation of that, these two are adjacent. The added value is inference, since a machine can reason across typed relationships and cannot reason across a flat list. The added cost is maintenance, because every new skill needs its relationships defined. For most organisations a well-built taxonomy is the right starting point.
Skills profile
A skills profile is one person's record of their skills, with a level for each, plus the certificates, experience and goals that back it up. It is the unit a skills inventory is built from. A profile is only useful while it is current, so the profiles that last are the ones the person has a reason to keep up to date, because the profile helps them get the work or development they want.
Skills taxonomy
A skills taxonomy is the controlled vocabulary of skills an organisation recognises, organised into families and levels, so that one skill has one name. It defines what may be recorded. It says nothing about who has what. Without one, "project management" means something different to every person who lists it, and "advanced Excel" covers everything from pivot tables to financial modelling. A taxonomy is a maintained asset that is never finished.
Skills-based hiring
Skills-based hiring evaluates candidates on the skills a role needs, instead of proxies such as degrees, job titles or years of experience. It widens the candidate pool, and skills-based hires have 9% longer tenure than traditional hires (BCG, 2023). It needs a precise list of the skills each role requires and at what level, which is why it usually starts with role profiles built on a skills taxonomy.
Skills-based organisation
A skills-based organisation makes work assignment, hiring, development and progression decisions using skills rather than job titles as the primary unit. It is an operating model rather than a piece of software, and the software is the least difficult part. The hard part is that job architecture, pay bands and management authority are usually built on titles, so a genuine move to skills touches all three at once.
Soft skills
Soft skills, also called human or essential skills, are behavioural abilities such as communication, collaboration, leadership and adaptability, as distinct from technical skills tied to a tool or a domain. They are harder to rate because they show in behaviour more than in output, so they work best with level descriptions written as observable behaviour and with input from more than one person.
Succession planning
Succession planning is identifying and developing people who could step into critical roles when the current holder moves on. A skills-based approach compares each candidate's current skills and levels with the role's requirements, so the gap and the development plan are specific. It also exposes key-person risk: roles or skills held by only one person, where a single departure would leave a hole.
Talent intelligence
Talent intelligence is the use of data about people, inside and outside the organisation, to make hiring, mobility and workforce decisions, often combining internal skills data with labour-market data such as salaries, demand and competitor hiring. Skills intelligence is the internal, skills-specific part of it. Vendors use the two terms loosely, so ask which data a product actually holds.
Talent marketplace
A talent marketplace is a system that matches people to internal opportunities, gigs, projects or roles, based on skills and availability. It is a distribution mechanism sitting on top of a skills inventory, and it fails without one. Marketplaces are usually sold to organisations large enough for people to be invisible to each other. Below roughly a thousand employees the matching problem is smaller than the data problem underneath it.
Time to competency
Time to competency is the elapsed time between a defined start point and the moment a person reaches a defined proficiency threshold in a skill or role. The number is meaningless without both anchors stated, and vendors quoting improvements rarely state either. Compare it only within one organisation, against its own baseline. Comparing it across companies usually just compares two different definitions of what "competent" means.
Training matrix
A training matrix tracks which courses each person has completed or is due to complete, usually against the mandatory training for each role. A skills matrix tracks what people can do, and at what level. The two are often confused: a complete training matrix can sit beside a team that still lacks the skills the training was meant to build. Regulated organisations usually need both, with certificates linking them.
Upskilling
Upskilling is building deeper or newer skills within a person's current line of work, such as a data analyst learning a new cloud data platform. Reskilling, by contrast, prepares someone for a different role. Upskilling is cheaper and faster to plan because the starting skills are adjacent, and it works only when the organisation knows which skills each person already holds, and at what level.
Utilisation rate
Utilisation rate is the share of a person's available working time spent on billable or planned project work, usually measured weekly or monthly in consulting and professional services. It is the most watched number in a consultancy and an incomplete one: high utilisation can hide burnout and leave no time for development, and low utilisation can mean the wrong skills, not too little demand. It reads best next to skills and availability data. More in our article on consultant utilisation rate.
Verified skill
A verified skill is one that somebody other than the claimant has confirmed, with the confirmation recorded: who confirmed it, on what date, and against what evidence. Verification is a provenance statement, not a quality statement, so a verified skill can still be held at a low proficiency. A certification with an uploaded document, a timestamp and a named validator is the strongest common form. A tick box added by an administrator is the weakest.
Workforce evidence
Workforce evidence is a record of what people in an organisation have actually done and can actually do, where every entry carries its source: who claimed it, who confirmed it, and when. The defining property is traceability rather than completeness. A skills database populated by inference is a set of estimates. Workforce evidence is a set of claims with attribution attached, which is what makes it usable in an audit, a bid, or a dispute.
Workforce planning
Workforce planning is deciding what capability an organisation will need over a defined horizon and how it will get it, by hiring, developing, redeploying or contracting. Strategic workforce planning works to years, operational resourcing works to weeks, and they use the same data at different resolutions. Plans built on job titles and headcount go out of date quickly, because roles change faster than titles do.