The Secret Life of Skills

Daniel Bluzer-Fry, development partner at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with director Peter Thomas and development partners Pete Cohen, Inder Singh, Kate Spencer, Sally McNamara, Helen Babb Delia and Courtney Guilliatt, on the #secretlifeofskills, an under-the-surface exploration of skills.

You may have found yourself in this position.

You left a role in which you were performing well, and where you enjoyed the connection with your peers and colleagues, to pursue a variety of other interests — only to find that some of the things you thought would be a sure bet just…evaporated.

Then, you struggled to balance the pay-the-bills work with the other interests you left to pursue in whatever way you could.

You began to feel isolated, disoriented about where you’re going and what you’re doing, and wondering if you’re really developing meaningful connections and growing your skills and capabilities. And perhaps, finally, you started asking who am I now?

That was me, just a few short months ago. How did it go for me? Has it worked out? Partially would be a good answer, for the moment.

This personal story hopefully illustrates how challenging life can be for most of us when it comes to exercising the skills we have, learning new skills and using them in ways that we, and others, value.

And, hopefully, it serves as an introduction to The Secret Life of Skills — a piece of work at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.

What do we want to do? We want to find what's under the surface of the skills narrative and access the lived experience of skills, upskilling and reskilling.

In short, we want to know The Secret Life of Skills.

Read on to find out why, and how, we’re doing this.

skill noun
/skil/
[uncountable] the ability to do something well
- The job requires skill and an eye for detail.
- skill in/at doing something What made him remarkable as a photographer was his skill in capturing the moment.

[countable] a particular ability or type of ability
- We need people with practical skills like carpentry or management skills.

It’s curious to think about skills.

The definition above speaks to ability, whilst hinting at a certain standard of that ability. But perhaps even more interesting is the fact that the definition anchors the term in labour and professional endeavour.

But what if this definition of skills is limiting us? Is managing one’s temperament — in learning, domestic or social contexts — something that could be defined as a skill and complementary to other skills, and how?

Or what about the idea of well? Highly subjective, situational and contextual, one might say. What skills does an activist artist really possess that they perform ‘well’? Visionary in the eyes of some, craftless rubbish in the eyes of others. And that’s before we get to the practical part and ask if it is possible to have a non-practical skill? Or perhaps consider that if the ‘something’ in the definition above is murder, whether we need to think about skills having a negative value. And think about ambidexerity — in its broadest sense — as the exercise of skills in more than one field or as the ability to flex to serve different purposes.

In reality, skill is one of those words we use all the time, often unrelectively. Depending on who is using it and why, might be synonymous with ability, competence, knack, aptitude or talent — or maybe not.

If you look at skill through a psychological lens, skills are what can be learned, measured and categorised; through a neoclassical economics lens, skills are one of the main ingredients of human capital, an investable and monetizable economic asset with prospective, if uncertain, returns; through a sociological lens, skill can be considered to be socially constructed — for example, the gender discrimination implicit when jobs that are predominantly held by women are seen as low-skilled.

Maybe all paid work, or maybe any kind of work — or maybe any kind of activity — is skillful; and so maybe you can only make distinctions along a spectrum between low-skilled and high-skilled.

So when we talk about skills we are on conceptually and linguistically slippery Through the Looking Glass post-structuralist ground. As Humpty Dumpty says, “When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” The whole thing is fluid and treacherous.

We are tackling skills in various ways in various projects at FORWARD — Sally McNamara’s People, Change and Durable Skillsets work or Kate Spencer’s Creativity, Creative Industries and Skills for the Future work, for example.

But we want to go deeper. To interrogate the very idea of skill itself. But not in some educational, pedagogical, neuroscientific, semiotic, linguistic, categorising, inventorising or even interdisciplinary kind of way, but in a how skills are meaningful to people way.

Undoubtedly, the key to unlocking meaningful insights into how we relate to skills — and perhaps even more so while we are in the white heat of extraordinary skill shortages — comes from walking in the footsteps of people. Different people, from different backgrounds, with a whole range of goals, experiences, life situations, aspirations and feelings. And not just in the sphere of professional endeavour, but everywhere.

In doing so, we can explore a number of issues such as the disconnect between institutions and people when it comes to skills and learning; the disparity between definitions of skill and the lived experience of skills; how people make decisions about skills they might acquire and why they make those decisions; how we acquire and cultivate skills in the many and varied ways we do; and yes, to try and understand what skills we may need in the future — and how we best enable people to get them.

I’ve been fortunate to spend the better part of eleven years conducting applied research projects in different parts of the world. I continue to do so.

But The Secret Life is Skills isn’t research — or at least in any conventional sense of the word — beyond it being a form of inquiry.

We’re going to blend a whole range of approaches to finding-out — and often not in the ways that methodological purists would find acceptable, comfortable or even recognisable.

The Secret Life of Skills is, at its essence, journalism — or maybe photojournalism, or maybe participative journalism, or maybe storytelling — crossed with some ethnographically-inspired looking-for, finding-out and sensemaking, blended with material culture studies crossed with a pinch of design fiction.

This latter approach, perhaps better known in future studies and tech circles, uses fictitious material artefacts from the near future to, in the words of its creator Julian Bleeker, “effervesce a kind of implied story that can be thought to represent a symptom of a possible near future world.” Design fiction aims to:

challenge ourselves to think thoroughly and deeply about the future […] To do Design Fiction is to briefly travel to a slightly changed world, to a slightly tweaked today that is the near future.

One of the reasons for this broad, permissive, inclusive and highly exploratory approach is not just the recognised problems with traditional qualitative research — quality of participants, observer bias or triangulation, the methodological horrors implicit in all social-scientific research, or the issues around of ‘informed consent ’highlighted in Helen Kara’s recent piece ‘Doing research as if participants mattered— but because we think it will be more applicable, relevant and actionable to the situation in which we now find ourselves.

And we are not just taking snapshots. We are in it for the longitudinal long-haul, trying to find out what matters and when to people in their lived experience of skills. As we have found in recent discussions with our stakeholders — and as we see in the increasingly panic-filled media narratives about skills shortages— it’s skill today, curious outdated artefact of no use next year; or unknown this year, must-have-on-fire skill the next.

So we’ll be publishing the results of our finding-out about The Secret Life of Skills frequently, incrementally and — given some wind behind us — coherently.

The result, we hope, should be illuminating, revealing and occasionally, perhaps, surprising.

If you’d like to learn a bit more about #secretlifeofskills talk to daniel.bluzer-fry@rmit.edu.au

FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.

Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria’s economic renewal.

We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.

We leverage RMIT’s multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.