A skill by any other name…

We studied Romeo & Juliet in Year 9, and I remember being mesmerised by the idea that Juliet, who was supposed to be the same age I was at that time, was having these deep, existential ponderings about the linguistic properties of her lover’s name, and what it meant for her future.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet; so Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d, retain that dear perfection which he owes without that title.

Fast forward a few years and I’ve been finding myself having the same sorts of deep ponderings about what words we use all the time actually mean. Only I’m not trying to rationalise hooking up with my enemy, I’m trying to work out how to understand the myriad of skill taxonomies and frameworks. Although this is, I suppose, another form of marrying opposing factions together.

My question today is “what does the word ‘skill’ actually mean?”

Like all old words, that’s not an easy thing to unpack – skil first emerged as an Old Norse word back in the early 12th Century. Back then, England was still working through the issues caused by William’s conquering the century before, Angkor Wat was rising from the jungle floor in Cambodia, and the Islamic Golden Age was in full swing. Skil referred to knowledge or divine wisdom and evolved from Proto-Germanic roots (*skel-) referring to cutting, separating, or making a distinction. In other words, this has always been a word which evaluates ability.

This connotation has persisted through to today, where the Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “an ability to do an activity or job well, especially because you have practised it”

But this kind of phrasing doesn’t always translate into usage. We often talk about skills as if they are physical things, things that we can count and measure, or as if they are groups of capabilities you can use to define other things. In spending so much time looking at the various skills taxonomies and frameworks, I’ve realised that there’s no consistent way to describe or define a skill, or to distinguish a skill from a task, which is a bit of a problem, because how can we claim to measure something, or compare it to something else, if we can’t even agree on what ‘it’ is?

To try to work this out, I did three things:

First, I tried to find an ‘official’-ish definition – what have other older and wiser people said about this in the past?
Next, I looked at how I understand a ‘skill’ and what it’s components should/could be
Finally, I thought about what’s maintaining the fuzziness in the language, and what we could do to overcome this (which led me all the way back to German, but I’ll explain that later)

I then brought this thinking back to my bigger Skill Mapping project which is still underway, which actually helped a lot with bringing some clarity to the map. I’m not quite ready to share too much about that just yet as it’s still very much ongoing and I’ve shared some snippets in other posts, but in this article I really just want to talk about what I now understand the word skill to mean and how I got there.

Who else has thought about this?

Thankfully, lots of other people have used their big brains to try to work this out before me. The work has been spread across a range of technically related fields, but in practice they don’t always talk to each other, so the ideas diverge a little depending on domain.

The sociologists kicked things off

Back in 1974, Harry Braverman took issue with the way skill was used as a ‘neutral’ description of what someone could do, masking power relations and social construction of what is valued. In Labor and Monopoly Capital, he explains how capitalism uses managerial control and task fragmentation to deskill labour – and while this idea was often contested, the idea of ‘skill’ as something that is socially constructed stuck. He worked out that ‘skill’ isn’t a ‘thing’ – the evaluation aspect means power and value is intrinsic in its construction – skill is something you can ‘have’ not just something you do.

This actually ties into Ken Roberts’ ideas around opportunity structure; the system gets to decide which skills count, and your position within the system (or ‘opportunity structure’) is more likely to decide which career pathways are open to you than any individual capability or skill level. Bourdieu talked about the same thing, and his concepts of cultural capital, habitus, and field provide the machinery for understanding how certain skills and competences are valued not because they’re objectively more important but because they’re the ones recognised and rewarded by the system.

The economists got involved

Not a group to be left out of a power struggle, the economists (and Gary Becker in particular) turned skills into a form of investment – something you can count, accumulate, trade, as units that (hopefully) yield returns. Investing in your skillset as a concept is still very much around today, and it’s this economic framework which usually underpins official skill taxonomies and frameworks. In attempting to create a hierarchy or framework for skills we are essentially creating an official comparison mechanism. In practice, this emerges as something like the O*NET Worker Requirements, where skill gets narrowed down into a ‘proficiency in applying knowledge to perform tasks, developed through practice’ so it can be evaluated and measured formally.

Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach offers a direct alternative. Sen argued that what matters isn’t what people have (skills, resources) but what they’re able to do and be (capabilities and functionings). This reframes the entire conversation – it’s not about inventorying skills but about asking what freedoms and opportunities a person has to live a life they value. Nussbaum extended this into a specific list of central human capabilities, that bear some resemblance to skills, such as “Practical Reason – Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life…”

Interestingly, there’s a well-established connection between Nussbaum’s capabilities and Self-Determination Theory (SDT), the psychological framework developed by Deci and Ryan which posits that human thriving depends on three basic needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. DeHaan, Hirai, and Ryan (2016) found that SDT’s basic needs partially mediate the relationship between capabilities and wellbeing. In other words, the structural freedoms Nussbaum talks about connect to psychological outcomes through the same mechanisms that underpin motivation and engagement. If you’ve ever wondered why a young person with all the ‘right skills’ still can’t seem to move forward, this connection might explain some of it – having skills (or capabilities) isn’t enough if the basic psychological conditions for using them aren’t in place.

Philosophers also had something to say

Waaaay back in 1949 Gilbert Ryle was thinking about the difference between knowing how and knowing what – something which I think is super important to acknowledge. A skill is something applied – not the thing itself, but the application of it. This can be a lot, so think about it this way – you could know every fact about horses under the sun, but still not be able to ride one – the facts are the knowledge, the application of that knowledge is the skill. This is why they are often coupled together (‘skills and knowledge’) because one without the other is only half of the picture.

Career theorists are a little different

Most career development theorists operate at a different level from the skills discourse, even though they often crop up within career conversations. Mark Savickas positions meaning and value in the career narrative, not in a skill inventory, positioning his 4C’s of concern, control, curiosity, and confidence at a different level of abstraction. There are also streams of theory like Planned Happenstance and Chaos Theory that claim it’s not possible to know what will come in the future, which undercuts the idea that you can ‘invest’ in skill development with any confidence of a return and directly contradicts the economists’ approach (and the frameworks which follow). Perhaps that’s why skills don’t tend to come up all that much in career development?

Policy writers are really the ones with the final say

All of this theoretical work is interesting, but in practice most of us working in this space interact with skills through frameworks and taxonomies, not through philosophy papers. And this is where it gets messy, because these frameworks all define and structure ‘skill’ differently:

In Australia, we have the Core Skills for Work Developmental Framework (CSfW), which describes non-technical skills across three skill clusters and five stages of performance. It’s explicitly not an assessment tool – it’s a framework for conceptualising and articulating skills. But notice the language: it uses ‘skills’ throughout while simultaneously acknowledging that performance depends on context, which is exactly the tension I’ve been describing. Work is being done on a new National Skills Taxonomy to replace the Australian Skills Classification, but we’re yet to learn how they will define skills.

At the European level, ESCO (the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations classification) attempts to create a shared language across EU member states, classifying skills, competences, and occupations in a multilingual taxonomy. Canada has the Skills and Competencies Taxonomy (SCT), linked to their National Occupational Classification, and the UK has recently published a Standard Skills Classification, generated by AI and drawing on a variety of other skills taxonomies. Singapore’s Critical Core Skills framework defines 16 skills across three clusters that they consider essential for the future economy.

The World Economic Forum publishes its Future of Jobs Report with its own skills categorisation, which has become enormously influential despite being primarily a survey instrument, and Skills Builder in the UK takes a different approach, focusing on eight ‘essential skills’ with a developmental progression.

And then there’s Lightcast (formerly EMSI/Burning Glass), who’ve built a taxonomy of over 33,000 skills derived from hundreds of millions of job postings, resumes, and profiles. Their approach is fundamentally different – rather than deciding what skills should be, they’re extracting what skills are actually being asked for and claimed in the labour market. This is the technocratic version of the debate: whose language defines what a skill is? What gets counted and what gets missed when you derive skills from job ads?

Each one of these bodies is trying to do the same thing, but they use different definitions, structures, hierarchies, and groupings.

If we can’t agree on the basics, is the problem built into the word itself?

When you come across an issue like this, where a word has been debated and interrogated so many times without a resolution, you have to start to ask if we’re trying to taxonomise a square peg into a round hole.

The meaning of a skill is complex. Skills aren’t just ‘things’ or ‘tasks’ or ‘performance evaluations’, they’re complex ideas that we clever humans can understand implicitly once they’re in context, but remain elusive when extracted from that context for the purpose of calculation or assessment.

When you pull apart how skills are expressed in language, you can find four different components:

verb (the doing)
subject (what the doing is applied to)
outcome (why the doing is being applied)
domain (the setting)

Note: when applied by someone an evaluation element emerges – how well has the doing been applied – but this bit isn’t as important for our purposes because I’m not trying to evaluate skills in individuals, I’m trying to work out what the heck we’re evaluating in the first place!

Verbs and Subjects

When we look at the four elements in a bit more detail, and in real examples, things get a bit clearer. The verb and the subject are constitutive – they do the work of defining what the skill is. Sometimes they get mushed together into one word like ‘communicate’, where the subject is implied – you have to communicate with someone, it’s not something you can do alone. The outcome and domain bring the context- they’re required for the skill to be applied, but they don’t define it or how it works.

Without an outcome or domain the skill can exist as a recognisable concept but it’s inert – it is merely describing a capability that hasn’t been deployed. As soon as the skill is applied the outcome and domain are forced into being, even if they aren’t explicitly stated in the language.

The verb impacts on both the subject and the outcome, but they are independent of each other. You can swap out the outcome without touching the subject – for example:

Monitor own heart rate to avoid cardiac arrest
Monitor own heart rate to improve running performance

Both are the same skill – ‘monitoring personal health data’ but with different outcomes of ‘staying alive’ and ‘running faster’, and you can evaluate this skill the same way for both outcomes, but changing the subject does change the skill:

Monitor own heart rate to avoid cardiac arrest
Monitor a patient’s heart rate to avoid cardiac arrest

These share a verb and an outcome but are not the same skill because the subject has shifted from self to other, and this shift drags in a completely different set of requirements; different equipment, different knowledge (clinical vs personal), different ethical obligations (data governance, duty of care), different relationships (professional vs self-management). The verb “monitor” is the same word in both, but the verb’s meaning shifts depending on where the subject sits on the self→world spectrum. Monitoring-yourself and monitoring-a-patient are different cognitive and practical acts wearing the same verb.

Domain

What about domain? This is often the factor which appears most prominently in skill taxonomies, and at first glance this makes sense; the encoding tools and language models being used to generate these complex taxonomies weight domain words most heavily because domain nouns are statistically dominant in the language. They’re high-frequency, high-specificity words that co-occur with everything else in their domain’s texts, so the model faithfully reproduces that dominance. Rather than a design choice, it’s an artefact of how occupational language itself is structured.

But domain isn’t actually a fourth equal component. It’s a modifier that attaches to whichever argument of the verb needs specifying, and how deeply it fuses depends on where you sit on the self-to-world spectrum.

Take the verb ‘monitor’ with three different subjects:

‘Monitor own heart rate to avoid cardiac arrest’ – here, domain attaches lightly to the subject through ‘heart rate’, which implies health, but the language stays abstract because it’s self-directed. I’m probably using a personal fitness device, looking at my own data, and the ‘health’ domain is barely visible
‘Monitor a person’s diet to avoid cardiac arrest’ – now domain splits. The person carries one domain (are they a patient, a friend, your boss?) and the diet carries another (health, nutrition)
‘Monitor medical equipment to avoid cardiac arrest’ – here, domain attaches to the subject and IS the subject. You can’t separate ‘medical’ from ‘equipment’ without losing the thing being monitored entirely. This is why world-directed skills are so much harder to abstract; the domain has fused into the skill itself.

This creates a real problem for AI encoding models, because in communication between humans the domain is very often implied in self-directed and other-directed skills – we all ‘know’ what context we’re talking about – but for world-directed skills it’s explicit and inseparable. The models can’t distinguish between the two, so they treat all domain information the same way and end up being able to differentiate more fully for areas like trades work or manual labour, and struggle more for professional work.

Skills and tasks are not the same

When all four components come together – verb, subject, outcome, and domain – it stops being a skill and becomes a task. A specific thing, done to a specific target, for a specific purpose, in a specific context. Monitor a patient’s heart rate to detect arrhythmia in a cardiac ward – that’s a task, and when someone carries it out we can evaluate their skill level in it: how well did they do the thing? That evaluation is the skill bit – the bit that we care about.

A list of tasks in English almost always revolves around the domain – this is the main organising factor, but it’s not the same in other languages, for example in German they use the word Tätigkeit, which sits at a level between individual tasks and broad occupational categories. As Jenn Barfield RPCDP, PCDAA, CHATP explained for me, tasks are the leaves and Tätigkeit is the tree – you might have hundreds of different leaves, but they often belong to just a few trees.

In German, Tätigkeit describes the nature or type of activity someone does (consulting, training, analysing), while their word for a single task (Aufgabe) is the specific duty (answering emails, organising meetings). Tätigkeit aligns more with what we’d call ‘functions’ or ‘areas of activity’ – it groups tasks by their shared verb and subject structure without implying any performance evaluation.

But we don’t have a direct translation for this in English, which means it falls back on the shoulders of skill as a concept. Actually, we ask the word skill to do quite a bit – it can be used to describe:

A group of skills, tasks, or competencies (communication skills)
A performance evaluation (you are skilled at speaking to others)
An asset you ‘own’ (I have communication skills)
Who you are (I am a skilled communicator)
A measurable policy unit (ESCO communication skills)

No wonder we can’t agree on a definition; the word is squishing too many concepts together. I asked earlier this week how people describe critical thinking, and even within our community people differed; some see it as a mindset, others as a cluster of skills, others as a personal attribute. We’re all using the same words but meaning different things.

This doesn’t mean we should throw the word out – we need it, and it’s not going anywhere. We have a skills gap, and we need to be able to measure, compare, and map skills if we’re going to close it. But I think the way through the mess is to get much clearer about the task structure that sits underneath.

What is a ‘skill’?

At the start of this article, I asked ‘what does skill actually mean?’ I don’t know if I have all the answers to that, but I’m hoping that by this point we’re in agreement that it doesn’t mean just one thing, and in fact means lots of different things in lots of different contexts, and we’ll probably never get them all onto the same page.

But I do think we can do a better job at defining what a skill actually is in the way that it’s often used when talking about the skills gap, or skills for work, because the official definition with its focus on personal ability isn’t going to cut it. If we want to abstract the skill itself from a defined domain or individual, then we need to start with the verb, subject, and outcome. If we know those (and arguably even just the verb and subject) I think we can start to group and compare skills in a methodical way. This is what I’m working on at the moment with the Skills Mapping project, and while it’s still pretty early, the evidence is showing that it may be possible to use these components to work out how skills relate to each other. But I’ll share more on that later.

Juliet wanted to know ‘What’s in a name?’ and I think she had a point. The thing (in this case, her crush) mattered more than what she called it, and for us the concept itself matters far more than any title we use to describe it.