How to use the skills passport rating scale
Getting the most out of a skills passport depends upon the consistent and reliable use of the scale.
At first glance, the 10-point semantic scale may seem a lot. However when you break the scale down to the key components the breadth of ratings makes sense. The three tiers reflect key stages of proficiency:
- Foundations: Think learning a new skill and the progress you take to understand the topic. At the start, you don’t know what you don’t know, and you begin learning the key concepts, and what’s expected. Then you gain deeper awareness of those concepts and build out your knowledge.
- Performance: Think becoming a skilled practioner. At first, you are developing the skill, you may have someone beside you or checking off your work, and then you gain enough experience to competently do the task on your own – but with some errors still. As you gain more practice, you become more accurate and work autonomously, and beyond that there’s the skilled level where you work independently, accurately and efficiently.
- Expert: Think contributor to either others or the field of knowledge itself. In-depth understanding of the skill and able to coach, develop others, add to the field of knowledge or practice of others.
The scale doesn’t reflect effort to shift between one rating to the next. In fact, the further you progress in the scale, the greater the effort to progress to the next tier. Moving from Beginner to Aware might be a matter of days (or a well structured training session), but moving from Coaches others to Mastery may take years. The scale provides depth of expertise for workplace skills.
Rating scale
Foundations tier
No awareness: This is the very first step to develop a new skill and reflects either the intention to learn this new skill or a new technical role requirement (eg a skill uplift program). Every skill defaults to this if another option isn’t selected.
Beginner: This rating means the person is just learning what this skill involves and the key concepts. This is like finding out all the chapters in a book and a rough idea of what they cover but without the detail.
Aware: This rating means the person is learning the detail within the concepts and gaining familiarity with this skill. Depending on the skill and the learning structure, this might be a short phase, or skipped altogether with the person going straight to developing.
Performance tier
Developing: This rating covers the novice learner requiring supervision. They have enough understanding of the concepts that they can put it into practice but requires supervision or a review/approval process before completion.
Competent: This rating means the person is capable of performing the skill on their own. They may ask questions, or make a few attempts but they can identify their mistakes and correct them or seek appropriate help so they still complete the task independently.
Proficient: This is a higher level of competence requiring the skill to be reliably completed independently to a consistently high quality and accuracy. Whilst proficient means competent or skilled, this is intended to reflect a higher standard of skill consistently demonstrated.
Skilled: This rating involves efficiently working at a proficient level. You consistently demonstrate a high quality of skill and with efficient use of time and other resources.
Expert tier
Supervises: At this level, a person is reviewing and improving the quality of the skill executed by others. They provide feedback, suggestions, tools, tips and techniques to improve the quality of work performed by other people.
Coaches others: At this level, a person develops others to a very high performance standard. This in particular includes leading and developing supervisors. This level supports the overall practice of the skill and makes improvements and efficiencies.
Expert: This rating is the ultimate level of expertise and reflects thought leadership. At this level, the person is contributing to the field of knowledge and/or best practices. They research, identify, design and develop new practices that expand the underlying system of work for this skill.
Still not convinced on the benefits of this scale?
This scale encourages both the skill accumulator and the skill developer. Often we overlook the career development of the person who loves doing what they already do and wants to be recognised for their expertise. This supports people who want to develop a deep level of expertise in their career whilst also supporting the skill accumulator who wants to add lots of skills. This gives enormous flexibility with setting meaningful career goals and that sense of progress and reward along the way.
At an organisational level, and for managers, this can help pinpoint the key skills that drive performance, and particular at what level. By using more than just a binary shown/not shown, the tool can help develop talent pipeline, identify single point dependency risks and identify skills development time frames.
More importantly this approach can support developing a diverse workforce, if backed with coaching conversations and workforce planning.
Research has indicated that gender and culture influences how a person rates their own skills and whether they apply for opportunities where they perceive a skills gap. In a simple shown / not shown model, a person doesn’t receive any feedback that can identify nor challenge this internal thought model. By providing more detailed ratings, managers can have meaningful conversations about a person’s capability and help challenge this lower self assessment. Then by setting and achieving skills goals, you can reinforce their ability to learn new skills. With enough sample, manager unconscious bias that affects ratings will also be evident, and provides another coaching opportunity.