Author: Nicole Horsman – Co Founder, Embed
Why organisations need to start with strategy, not technology, and what we can learn from two very different approaches to building capability.
The conversation about skills is everywhere right now. What capabilities will organisations need as technology evolves? How do we prepare our people for roles that may look very different in five years’ time? These are genuinely important questions and there’s no shortage of perspectives, frameworks, and solutions being put forward in response.
Having spent my career working across both Further Education and Corporate Learning, I’ve observed this conversation from two quite different vantage points. These are sectors that both care deeply about skills development, but have historically approached it in distinct ways and there’s real value in examining what each can learn from the other.
Courses don’t develop skills. They give you the knowledge foundation. Skills are built through practice, assessment, and deliberate improvement – over time.
That distinction matters more than it might seem. A lot of what passes for skills development in organisations is actually knowledge transfer, which is valuable, but it’s only the beginning. The journey from understanding something to being able to do it reliably, under real conditions, is where the real work of skills development happens.
Two industries, one-word, different meanings
In Further Education, skills development has a well-established architecture. There are frameworks, regulated qualifications, and competency-based assessments. Crucially, there’s a shared understanding that skill acquisition takes time. You don’t earn a vocational qualification by attending a workshop, you demonstrate competence, repeatedly, in conditions that mirror real practice.
Corporate L&D has historically operated somewhat differently. “Skills development” has often meant participation in a learning programme, completion of a module, or attendance at a course. These are all genuinely useful but they are primarily knowledge inputs, not skill formation. The gap between knowing and doing is where many well-intentioned learning investments struggle to gain traction.
The lesson corporate learning might draw from Further Education is one of rigour: defining what a skill actually looks like in practice, assessing it against clear criteria, and creating sustained conditions for improvement. The lesson FE might take from corporate is agility and the ability to respond quickly to changing business needs and design learning that is contextual and role-specific.
Why the tasks and skills distinction matters
A shout out here to Steve Rick, Head of Learning Technology at ECITB, and his helpful insight from his session at Learning Tech 2026. Steve’s thinking on the difference between skills and tasks gives a distinction that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves, but which has real practical implications for how organisations approach learning strategy.
There are clear distinctions between skills and tasks. A task is something observable and specific – “produce a monthly financial report,” “chair a team meeting,” “handle a customer query.” A skill is the underlying capability that enables someone to perform tasks well across varying conditions. Skills generalise; tasks are specific. When skills mapping conflates the two, learning interventions can end up targeting task completion rather than genuine capability development, which limits how well learning transfers to new situations.
Getting this distinction right changes the shape of a skills strategy considerably. It brings L&D functions into closer dialogue with workforce planning, operational leadership, and job design, which is where it arguably belongs.
Putting strategy before technology
One pattern that recurs across organisations of many different types and sizes is the tendency to move quickly towards technology decisions before the underlying strategy is sufficiently clear. A skills development priority is identified, a project begins and before long, the conversation has shifted to platform evaluation and content libraries.
Technology is an important enabler, but it works best when it’s chosen to serve a well-defined purpose. Selecting a learning platform before fully understanding what the organisation needs to learn, and how it wants to learn it, can create constraints that are difficult to unpick later.
It is essential to understand what the organisation needs to deliver, and how it wishes to deliver it, before becoming tied to a technology that may not fully meet its requirements.
What a strategic approach looks like in practice
The foundation of a credible skills strategy is a clear-eyed understanding of current capability. But the work that often gets underinvested and which makes everything else more effective, is the development of a meaningful skills taxonomy: a structured map of what capability actually looks like across different roles and professional groups, at different levels of proficiency.
A well-designed taxonomy does several things at once. It creates a shared language for talking about capability across the organisation. It enables more precise training needs analysis. And it provides a durable framework for tracking development over time and not just whether people have completed learning, but whether their capability has genuinely moved.
What a skills taxonomy usually contains
| Skill domains | Broad capability areas relevant to the organisation or professional group. For example, leadership, data literacy, stakeholder management, technical delivery.
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| Skill clusters | Groups of related skills within each domain, reflecting the way capability is organised in practice and not in training catalogues. |
| Proficiency levels | Clear descriptions of what each skill looks like at different stages. From awareness through to expert practice. These anchor assessment and make development visible.
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| Role expectations | Mapping of which skills matter for which roles, and at what level. Providing the bridge between the taxonomy and day-to-day performance expectations.
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Building a taxonomy is not a one-time exercise. It requires ongoing maintenance as roles evolve, as new capabilities become relevant, and as the organisation’s strategic direction shifts. That’s an important reason why it needs to be owned at a senior level and not treated as an L&D administrative task.
Where board engagement belongs in all of this
Skills strategy is frequently described as a board-level priority. The intent is genuine but intent and engagement are not the same thing. In many organisations, workforce capability sits on the board agenda as a standing item, while the actual decisions that shape it are made several layers down, often without a clear line of sight to organisational strategy.
Effective board engagement in skills development isn’t about boards approving training budgets or signing off on LMS procurement. It’s about something more fundamental: ensuring that the organisation’s capability agenda is directly connected to its strategic ambitions, and that senior leaders are actively accountable for building the workforce the organisation needs.
Where boards adds most value
Setting the strategic capability ambition – what does the organisation need its people to be able to do in three to five years? Holding executive teams accountable for the workforce development investment and its outcomes. Ensuring that skills data features in organisational performance reporting, not just financial data. And creating the conditions for L&D to operate as a strategic function, not a support service.
This matters because the decisions that most affect skills development around investment levels, the pace of change, the balance between hiring and developing, the time given to people to learn are decisions that only senior leaders can make. L&D functions can design excellent programmes, but they can’t create the organisational conditions for learning to stick. That requires leadership commitment at the highest levels.
A useful practical test: if skills and capability were removed from the board agenda for six months, what would change? If the honest answer is “not very much,” that’s a signal that the engagement is more ceremonial than strategic — and that the work of embedding it more meaningfully is still to be done.
Putting the pieces together
A credible, strategic approach to skills development tends to follow a clear sequence — one where the diagnostic work comes first, the design work follows, and technology decisions come last.
1 – Board Level
Strategic capability ambition
Board and executive leadership define what the organisation needs its workforce to be able to do, now and in three to five years. This anchors everything that follows and ensures skills strategy is connected to organisational direction, not running parallel to it.
2 – Organisation-wide Skills & Strengths audit
Establish a benchmark of current capability across professional groups. Identify the gap between where the organisation is and where it needs to be. Surface the areas where development effort will have the greatest impact.
3 – Skills taxonomy design
For each professional group, develop a structured taxonomy of skill domains, clusters, and proficiency levels. This becomes the shared language of capability across the organisation, the reference point for performance conversations, career development, and learning design alike.
4 – Needs analysis by professional group
Use the taxonomy and audit findings to identify specific development priorities for each cohort, both current gaps and emerging needs. This is where the broad picture becomes an actionable plan.
5 – Learning strategy design
With clarity on what needs to be developed and for whom, design the how, delivery methods, assessment approaches, practice conditions, and the sequencing of learning over time.
6 – Platform & technology commissioning
With a defined scope of learning needs, delivery preferences, and budget parameters in place, the organisation is now well-positioned to make an informed technology decision and one that serves the strategy, rather than shaping it.
A more considered way forward
The skills conversation is going to keep evolving, and the tools available to support learning will develop alongside it. But the fundamentals of a good approach don’t change: understand where you are, be clear about where you need to be, build a shared language for capability, and create conditions where real skill formation can happen.
For organisations ready to take skills development seriously, not just as a line on a strategy document, but as an operational priority with genuine leadership commitment, the taxonomy is the place to start. It gives the whole system something to orient around. And for boards and senior leaders, the question isn’t whether skills development is important. It’s whether the organisation is approaching it in a way that’s equal to the challenge.
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