We began developing skills frameworks ten years ago, first as the scaffolding to support personalised courses and then as the basis for skill-driven LXP content recommendations. We worked with London Economics and the UK Productivity Leadership Group to define a skills framework that demonstrably supported organisational productivity.

Since then our analysts have developed frameworks to support multiple capability and business transformation programmes in some of the world's most successful organisations - sometimes underpinning the broad skills set required by knowledge workers, sometimes with a focus such as data, digital or leadership skills.

When we develop skills frameworks we blend ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ perspectives on organisational priorities. We are data-driven where possible, so we gather diverse data sources that shine a light on those two perspectives: business plans, strategic initiatives, reports on future of skills in the sector giving a top-down view, LXP / LRS data, search data, surveys etc. grounding findings in the detail.

We’ve applied this approach and expertise to the Skills Palette to produce an off-the-shelf framework, structured according to common capability priorities and grounded in real-world learning, but reflecting the priorities for organisational capability in the coming years.

The approach we've taken (as with much of our work) is data-informed human curation: we include and define skills suggested by real-world data, but with discretion left to curators to keep the Palette coherent and lean.

With each successive client project, we revise the Palette: where we encounter an important skill that is not covered, and that is valuable to knowledge workers, we add to the Palette either directly or by adjusting the definition of existing skills.

How does the Skills Palette differ from other skill frameworks?

Every learning product or system comes with a skill framework of its own. There are also specific, large frameworks you can buy as a standalone or as an add-on to another product. So how is ours different?

It's linked to lots and lots of learning content

The Skills Palette automatically applies to any source of content we choose to include in our database. The Skills Palette is the engine for a tagging system that can deal with any natural language content - it isn't locked into any particular content library or product.

You can adapt it easily

You're able to choose from most skill framework products and customise them to your requirements. However, the problem is that the underlying identity of a skill you rename won't change. It'll still link to the same courses and resources. The Skills Palette is named as such because it is truly adaptable. We can customise a version for your skill requirements and adjust the definition so that all the linked content also changes.

Skills Palette definitions

This section lists the skills included in the Palette, by skills group.

💼 Commerciality and business savvy