Writing
Skills in L&D
We are attracted to skills frameworks because they promise clarity, but we underestimate the maintenance work that keeps a skills system useful, current, and adopted inside real teams.
Skills maps are not one time projects. They demand continual updates, governance, and feedback loops, otherwise they decay into a static list that no one trusts.
When maintenance is ignored, the organization still looks busy with skill programs, but the system stops guiding real work. That gap is where credibility gets lost.
The practical move today is to encode skills into the AI systems that already run workflows. If the system can surface the skill when a task appears, people can use it without memorizing it.
That does not remove human judgment, but it makes skills visible and usable at the moment of need, which is what L&D actually wants.
Focus on maintenance, then embed those skills into AI powered workflows so people can spend their energy on judgment and context instead of memorization.