Skills tell you what someone has learned to do. Capability tells you what they can actually do with it when the context changes. This session unpacks the difference, why it matters more than ever as AI reshapes how work gets done, and how skills evidence and capability recognition work together rather than in competition.
The webinar, facilitated by Yasmin King, Director & Co-Founder of SkillsAware, will explore:
What a capability actually is: a skill, a mindset, a behaviour and a value, expressed together in context, not a synonym for skill
Why skills are important but have a shelf life in the current pace of change, and why that’s a design problem, not a failure of anyone building skills frameworks
The proficiency layer: how capability is judged by autonomy, influence and complexity, not just presence or absence
A short, concrete example contrasting the same underlying skill (communication, judgement) expressed differently across two work contexts
Where this connects to formal recognition and portability, including university credit pathways, so the audience sees where capability evidence can actually lead
How SkillsAware is surfacing evidence from the full breadth of a person’s experience, not just their most recent job – including informal and life-wide sources most systems miss – and how this can be mapped to skills and capabilities
A practical example of skills evidence captured through the platform, and what happens to it once it exists
- The gap SkillsAware itself is trying to close: up to a large share of a person’s actual skills going undiscovered by traditional systems
Attendees can expect to:
Leave with a clear, usable distinction between a skill and a capability, and why conflating them causes real problems in hiring, L&D, systems and recognition design
Understand how skills evidence infrastructure and capability recognition are two necessary layers of the same system, not competing approaches
Walk away with language they can take back into their own organisation to start the conversation, plus a sense of where formal recognition (including qualification pathways) can actually take that evidence