Why Skills Matter
It wasn’t long ago when we could decide on one career path or job. That’s not the case anymore.
Many jobs or career paths available today may not exist tomorrow or next year. To match this change, regardless of whether you are an employer or a job candidate, it is critical for us to shift from thinking about jobs to thinking about skills. The right skills will allow us to adapt and change as quickly as the world around us.
Skills incorporate a combination of aptitude, ability, knowledge, and competencies to complete a job or task. Your skills are your competitive advantage, but only if prospective employers or clients believe you have them.
This is how Trusted Skills professional certification can give you the advantage.
Understanding Skills
Enabling Skills
Enabling skills (sometimes called soft skills or transferable skills) enable you to adapt and adopt new job-specific skills. Examples of enabling skills include communication skills, problem solving skills, collaboration skills, and core literacies (e.g. technology literacy).
Job Skills
Job-specific skills are the skills you need to complete a specific job, whether that’s welding, teaching, engineering, or soccer.
Job-specific skills used to be the most valued by employers because they helped to generate short-term economic value. For many professions, from accountants to skilled trades to engineering, there are accepted frameworks to assess their skills.
The challenge is job-specific skills are highly contextual, and in today’s fast paced world, they don’t stay relevant for long. In the past, if you learned a trade as a teenager, it could be developed and refined through a lifetime of experience and keep its value.
Today, job-specific skills become outdated and need further training to keep their value.
Skills & Trust
Hiring a new employee is the biggest risk of any employer. To reduce this risk, employers want evidence that you possess the skills you say you do. All skill certification is rooted in trust and legitimacy. We trust doctors, electricians, and accountants because they’ve been certified by other professionals as meeting the criteria to do a job.
Trusted Skills professional certification builds on this same principle — professionals certifying professionals. For employers, this means a job candidate has been assessed by a Trusted Skills reviewer that they have the skills they claim to have. For candidates, it means you’ve been certified in the skills you claim to have and that an employer needs.
