Of the 3 Types of Skills, One Is Quickly Becoming Most Important | Learning Blog - LinkedIn Learning

Photo: Paul Petrone

Paul Petrone, Marketing Manager at LinkedIn summarizes, "Research has found there are three types of skills in the world: knowledges, transferable skills and self-management skills."

Photo: Tambako, Flickr

Not too long ago, knowledges – what you know – were the most important skills in the workplace. With knowledge limited, people would spend years mastering a specific expertise and then build their career around that.

But that’s quickly changing, according to LinkedIn Learning Instructor Gary Bolles. In a rapidly changing world where information is a commodity, transferable skills – aka what you can do – are quickly becoming most important, Bolles said in his LinkedIn Learning course on hiring and developing your future workforce.

For organizations, this has a dramatic affect on hiring and the importance of developing your workforce.

The three types of skills 
While there’s no shortage of skills in the world, they all fall into three main categories, according to researcher Sidney Fine. They are:

• Knowledges

Knowledges are, as the name implies, knowledge of a specific field. So, for example knowing the type of brake pad needed in a 2002 Honda Civic or the amount of salt to add to pork roast or how to build a pivot table in Excel are all types of knowledges.

• Self-management skills

Self-management skills are skills on how you do your work. Time management is a classic self-management skill, for example. Self-management skills have always been important, are still important and will remain important, regardless of market conditions.

• Transferable skills

Transferable skills are boiled down to what you can do and can apply to almost any task you take on. For example, your learning ability is a transferrable skill. Leadership skills are a transferable skill. Being strategic is a transferrable skill.
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Source: Learning Blog - LinkedIn Learning