#13 Historians’ skills
A Case Study to Build a Skills Library
TL;DR
This post explores the creation of a skills library, using 'historian' as a case study to illustrate the process. We will discover defining the role, understanding value creation, adapting to technological advancements, and ensuring skill transferability. By analyzing these aspects, we offer a blueprint for identifying and cataloging essential skills across any profession, demonstrating the universality and applicability of skills-based talent management.
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In previous few episodes, we reviewed the benefits and key considerations of skills-based talent management. In this episode, we will explore a practical application of skills-based talent management: the creation of a skills library, an important core asset of skills-based talent management.
We will particularly focus on ‘historian’ as a job role, as this blog is dedicated to extracting insights from historical events for HR professionals and leaders. It might look less relevant to your professional fields, but don’t worry. Once you learn how to identify skills of historians, you can apply the same method to other job roles to create an entire skills library.
What is Historian?
Before discussing the skillset of historians, let's first define the job role of a historian. The role of a historian extends to a range of professionals, including history teachers, museum curators, and advisory experts. According to Wikipedia, "a historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it."
For the purposes of this discussion, let's consider a historian as a university professor specializing in Renaissance Art Studies. Her work involves various activities such as teaching history and providing advice for documentary movies about Renaissance art. To simplify our discussion, let's focus on an important aspect of her work: publishing academic papers. Academic papers in history can bring significant value to society by offering new knowledge and perspectives that contribute to human advancement.
Imagine yourself as an HR manager tasked with the skills development of university professors. (It’s highly unlikely that this kind of job exists, but it would be super exciting if it does, wouldn’t it be?)
Principles to Create a Skills Library
To create a meaningful skills library, we need to consider several key principles.
Understanding the Value Creation Process
Understanding the value creation process within job roles is essential, as skills contribute significantly to the final value that beneficiaries enjoy. Let’s use China’s Imperial Examination system we discussed in the previous episodes. In order to design the examination curriculum, the Chinese government must have thought about what values the bureaucrats can bring to the nation. This required an in-depth understanding of the value generation process.
Likewise, to identify the skillset required for historians, you need to understand how historians create values. Simply put, the value of historians lies in providing new perspectives based on history to humanity. In order to create this value, historians input knowledge, process the information by analyzing and structuring them, and output the findings in the form of writing and presenting.
Understanding the Landscape of the Job
The landscape of any job is constantly evolving, influenced by emerging trends and technological advancements. Understanding these changes is crucial for staying relevant and competitive in the job market. For instance, the adaptations in China's Imperial exam system, which once focused primarily on Confucian classics, eventually incorporated Western scientific knowledge to keep pace with global developments. Since the change was too fast to catch up with, the examination system was put to an end in 1905.
Let’s consider technological advancements to identify the necessary skills for historians. For example, handling digital archives and database emerged as an important skill in the advent of the Internet in the last few decades. Obviously, Herodotus, the renowned ancient historian, would not have contemplated this modern necessity.
More recently, leveraging Artificial Intelligence is becoming a key skill to pushing historical studies to the next step. AI would help the Renaissance Art History professor transcribe handwritten documents, identify subjects and dates of paintings, and even discover hidden stories between two historical events. If you want to know more examples, you can read this article from World Economic Forum and another one from MIT Technology Review.
Ensuring Transferable Skills
Ensuring that one's skill set is versatile and transferable is crucial in a dynamic job market. The Chinese imperial exam system might have been designed in such a way that officials could be moved to different roles, based on fundamental skills such as Confucian knowledge. If you need to hire more data science professors at your university, you might consider history professors as candidates not because of their history knowledge but of their analytical skills.
While it may sound far-fetched, such transitions are often feasible in the business world. For example, a marketing manager who has developed strong analytical skills could transition to a data analyst role with a relative ease. This transition becomes possible when the company implement skills-based talent management. Otherwise, it is hard to convince stakeholders to transform a marketing professional into a data professional.
Skillset for Historians
Now, let's consider the essential skills that historians need. This list of skillset is our suggestion, and you may need to customize it to fit your specific organizaitonal context.
Historical Knowledge:
Contextual Understanding: The ability to place events within their broader historical context, considering cultural, social, political, and economic factors.
Chronological Awareness: A strong grasp of timelines and the sequence of events, which helps in understanding cause and effect relationships in history.
Thematic Specialization: Expertise in specific historical themes, periods, or geographical areas, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of historical patterns and developments.
Research Skills
Source Identification: Proficiency in locating primary and secondary sources relevant to research topics.
Critical Evaluation: Ability to assess the credibility, perspective, and context of historical sources.
Archival Research: Skills in navigating physical and digital archives, and handling archival materials appropriately.
Analytical Skills
Historical Reasoning: Capacity to construct well-founded arguments using historical evidence.
Comparative Analysis: Skill in comparing and contrasting historical phenomena to draw insightful conclusions.
Interdisciplinary Integration: Ability to incorporate methods and insights from related fields such as sociology, anthropology, and economics into historical analysis.
Writing and Communication Skills
Academic Writing: Expertise in crafting clear, coherent, and well-argued historical narratives and analyses.
Public Speaking: Competence in presenting historical information and arguments effectively to an audience.
Digital Communication: Ability to convey historical knowledge through various digital platforms, including blogs, podcasts, and social media.
Technology Skills
Digital Humanities Tools: Proficiency with software and platforms used for digital mapping, text analysis, and online exhibitions.
Archival Management Software: Knowledge of databases and content management systems for organizing and preserving historical records.
Statistical Analysis: Understanding of statistical tools for quantitative analysis or AI for pattern recognition and predictive modeling.
Professional and Ethical Skills
Ethical Research Practices: Commitment to maintaining integrity in historical inquiry and respect for source material.
Networking: Ability to build professional relationships within the historical community for collaboration and knowledge exchange.
Project Management and Grant Writing: Skills in organizing, planning, and securing funding for historical research projects.
Once you identify the skillset for one job, you can scale the practice into major jobs in your company to build an entire skills library.
Conclusion
As we have observed in several episodes, skills-based talent management is an effective method for unleashing your organization's potential, even in the fields far from business like historians. We would like to emphasize that the concept of skills-based talent management can be used not only for enterprise people development, but also personal growth and professional development for anyone.
Even chefs or stand-up comedians can apply the skills development process described above. The key is to break down the value creation process and understand the technological and social environment surrounding the topic to identify the skillset.
If the skills are transversal, you can use the skills for other topics. If you are good at presenting your cuisines, you may be able to use the skills for other artistics works or contents creation for marketing. Just as ancient Chinese government officers mastered a variety of disciplines to navigate the complexities of their era, you too can draw inspiration from their holistic approach.