The most important factor for managing skills in your organisation is skill invisibility. The critical skills are the ones you will struggle to see, and in fact may not look like skills at all.
Take the skill of walking. Most of us would not characterise walking as a skill…it is an easy thing to do that everyone does. But any adult who has had a brain injury which requires them to re-learn to walk will tell you that walking is incredible difficult. Walking is actually a very complicated mechanical and control system problem. Of course most of us work on this problem when we are in the first years of life, and the skill of walking becomes embodied. By this I mean that the skill of balancing, falling forward, and coordinating our limbs gets ‘programmed in’ to our bodies and taken over by systems that operate without our conscious control.
In fact the most difficult skills (like walking) are not achievable by our conscious mind along and can only be performed successfully by delegating tasks to our subconscious systems like proprioception. But what has this got to do with skills in organisations you ask?
The most critical and important skills your organisation possesses are likely to be largely invisible to your organisation. They will have been embodied in your organisational systems and within the culture of your teams such that they are no longer clearly visible.
Lets face it, your organisation does not survive or thrive because of how many people know how to use Excel or Python. It survives and thrives because it is uniquely adapted to a specific problem set it can solve better than most other organisations.
So if you are working with a skills taxonomy that is based on self-reported skills or job descriptions you are probably missing the most important skills your organisation has.
To understand your really critical skills requires an outsider to observe and identify the key skills which are embodied in your organisation.