There’s a big shift coming in the L&D landscape.
According to the experts, skills acquisition alone is no longer the way forward. Instead, organisations are also setting their sights on capabilities development as fundamental to business success.
What's the difference between skills and capabilities?
The two terms are often used interchangeably, but as it turns out, skills and capabilities aren’t the same thing.
According to Hays, skills are context-specific learned abilities — or, in plain language, skills are the knowledge and abilities you deploy to do a certain job in a given environment. Typing is an important skill for a stenographer; managing staff is an important skill for a leader; diffusing conflict is an important skill for someone who works in a complaints department.
By contrast, Future Leadership describes capabilities as encapsulating multiple types of expertise: acquired skills, tactical knowledge, learned behaviours, personal attributes and pervasive mindsets. Skills change, but capabilities endure, says the Deloitte Centre for the Edge — which is why a healthy dose of capabilities training should form part of your broader upskilling strategy.
So, what are the future capabilities we should be developing?
Well, that depends on who you ask. Future Leadership asked 300 executive, C-suite and general managers that same question and found that the top five in-demand future capabilities (out of 16) are:
- Adaptability and resilience
- Strategy and purpose
- Innovation and creativity
- Initiative and drive
- Communication and influence
By contrast, McKinsey advocates for teaching capabilities in four quadrants that speak to how individuals need to operate within a business or organisation:
- Teach them the business (strategic priorities, initiatives and targets)
- Teach them management (managing teams, shifting mindsets and driving accountability and continuous improvement)
- Ensure technical and functional skills (developing practical skills for today and critical skills to drive growth and value in the future)
- Develop them personally as colleagues and leaders (translating performance goals into relational and adaptive behaviours; building new habits through continuous coaching).
On a superficial level, these sound like drastically different approaches, but if you look into the detail, the messaging is very similar: capabilities are less about being able to execute a particular action in the workplace and more about contributing to how an organisation identifies, understands and executes its strategic goals, now and into the future.
Shifting the focus of L&D
If the transition from skills to capabilities feels counterintuitive, that’s because it is — for years, we’ve been told that upskilling anyone and everyone in an organisation is the path to success in the face of rapid technological change. Upskilling remains a valuable tool, but the way we approach it might be in for an overhaul.
The difference likely lies in the training approach. Rather than solely teaching people how to do something, the focus will increasingly expand to include teaching them how to think — about their practices and values, about the links between their role and business growth, and about the personal and professional attributes they’ll need to continue delivering in the workplaces of today and tomorrow.
Get a head start on building future capabilities within your teams with training from Plus UTS. Our expert team can help you identify the most pressing capability gaps in your organisation and help you fill the gaps with a bespoke training package.
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