The Original Sin of Skills Ontologies with Mike Erlin, founder and CEO of AbilityMap

Most of us are familiar with the concept of original sin in Western theology. Well, there is original sin in skills ontologies, too. It was the early 1950s, and the United States Army had established a behavioral science research and development institute. The objective? Introduce efficiency and standardization to the training process. Figure out who was best at what. A psychologist by the name of Paul G. Whitmore, founder of the initiative, made an executive decision that has dogged our discussion of people skills ever since. He classified them into two types—hard skills, which are easy to measure, and soft skills—which, at the time, were not at all easy to measure. This is the original sin of modern skills ontologies, says Mike Erlin, founder and CEO of AbilityMap and host Brent Skinner's guest for this episode of the podcast. We should lose the bifurcation and look at skills holistically. They’re all human skills, after all.

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