My most recent Skills Model, and Specialist Skills of Estimation

Skills Model
Under Appreciated Specialist Skills

Toolkit Model of Skills

Skills are best understood as a tool kit. A skill is best described by its funciton or what it sets out to do. Influence skills are there to change people’s mind, Problem solving skills are to solve particular fields of problems, Analysis skills are there to make sense of Data and the Observable World.

Lets keep the Toolkit Mental model going forward. So basically imagine a Toolkit for Influence – Changing people’s mind or affecting their Decisions. There are many tools for that: framing, deception, argument, logic, etc… we can go into details like Fibbing, Lying, exaggerating, focusing on the Positive, Focusing on the negative, Exploitation of all the Arguments, Biases, Fallacies etc… these are the many tools to Influence. Some tools are easy and some are hard, sometimes we have the chance to try a Different Tool, sometimes we only have one chance. Some tools are better for some situations, and some are pretty good for a lot of situations, while some are good for a narrow type of situations. Some are not so good, but is better than nothing, some are inappropriate but we use it for the unintended use always. To model Skills like Toolkits is to look at the best method of tracking Tools in a Toolkit that is able to allow use to look at these details.

You can say I use a Toolkit model of a Skill.

4th dimension, aka time, forgetting, learning, effort, and opportunity for skills. NOW this is the interesting part of what ever toolkit model you have for Skills. That we have the scarcity of Time and Effort Tracking them, that the Bandwidth we use to Employ the skill. For me the Total Cost of Ownership Model.

My Total Cost of Ownership Model

Phases of Constraints/Costs/Requirements	Example
Initial	Initial Purchase Price, learning Time and Cost,
Recurring	Practice, Maintenance, Exercise,
Period	Measure of the recurring costs over a period of week, month, year, etc.
Closing	Selling or Disposal Price, Time to forget or remove or unlearn a bad habit, Selling your car when your moving on to a different one.

Combined, I’ll give a procedure in the Future – You have the mental model of skills that WHEN practiced and CHUNKED will allow a person to plan and hack his skills OR better yet run an RPG with realistic model of Skills.

Specialist Skills People Can’t Value

I recently encountered the Cost Estimator/Quantity Surveyor/Cost Accountant to be one of the most under-appreciated skills. If you have a lot of Money, these guys are important but when your a business like ours struggling to find the next project – its one of the skills and specializations we NEED but that’s just me alone convinced that I’m crazy and maybe a Construction and Manufacturing Company our size can do without it.

You’ll notice these guys are hard to Value because you’d need to understand Statistics, Analysis, and Highly Academic Qualitative concepts to Appreciate it. And if you are in a room of people who can appreciate that then I envy you, because Analysis alone drives me doubting everything and feeling isolated and alone.

While that is a long way off for me to be able to Prove that we need it, I’m going to make our DATA SYSTEMS and MANAGEMENT so easy that if we ever get such a person, they just need 2-3 months to start churning out output and we feel that feedback in about 4-6 months after. And by the time I’ve had that person’s design requirements down I can shorten the feedback loop to months or every two weeks.

Game in the Brain