How do you compare the skills of two different people?

For decades, the way we learned and tested took place on a straight line. Think about the SATs — the famous exam taken by American high schoolers for their university applications. The SATs assess test-takers in two categories: “Math” and “English” (now “evidence-based reading and writing”). A few weeks later, the student receives a score out of 1600 with almost no added information or feedback. For the universities choosing who to accept or reject, the SATs give them a convenient, straight line on which to compare every single applicant.

But we don’t develop skills on a straight line.

Each person’s skills and knowledge are multidimensional. Each skill level is tied to other skills; improving in one skill leads to associated improvements in other skills. And our abilities can’t just be broken down into two generic categories; the number of domains and individual skills we can learn throughout our lifetime is limitless.

At Workera, we know that you can’t measure skills or compare learners along a straight line. That’s why we’ve developed a Skills Galaxy — a detailed, interactive map that allows users to better understand their skill levels and take effective, data-backed steps toward improvement.

I’d like to explain in more details  why we need a new way to visualize skills, and how our Skills Galaxy solves the problem.

The problem with existing systems

There are three significant problems with existing approaches to skills development and assessment.

• Learning isn’t linear: Think about a typical college course. You have to attend dozens of lectures, and every student attends those lectures in the same order. The professor has determined which sequence will be the most effective, but it’s still a one-size-fits-all curriculum. The reality is that learning doesn’t take place on a straight line in this way. Every learner is unique, with different experiences and learning styles. If there are 100 students in a lecture hall, each one might have a different optimal content sequence.

• Everyone has different starting points: Let’s continue with the example of a college course. If an engineering course has 30 lectures, does every student need to attend all 30 lectures in order? Maybe a specific student excelled in mathematics in high school, and they would be fine to start with the seventh lecture. Another student might be able to skip the first three, as well as the eighth lecture, because they’ve already learned the content on their own. Everyone is starting from a different skill level, and it doesn’t make sense to waste a learner’s valuable time just because everyone needs to follow the same sequence.

• Development is granular, not pass/fail: “Math” and “English” aren’t straightforward categories in which you are either skilled or unskilled. Each of these categories breaks down into hundreds of individual skills, and each person’s levels will vary significantly across those skills. In order to learn efficiently and effectively, learners need to be able to understand their current skill levels at a much more granular level than just “pass/fail” or a score out of 1600 without feedback.

Multi-dimensional development

When we let go of the straight line, we can instead visualize skills in a different way. Your skills are endlessly interconnected: not just the skills you apply in your studies or career, but also the skills you use in your personal life and your relationships. Your ability to speak English impacts your ability to manage a marketing campaign; your skills in communication will shape your skills in raising children or coaching a basketball team. None of these skills exist in a vacuum — they are all tied to one another.

Workera’s Skills Galaxy is built to highlight these connections. Skills that are relevant to one another — for example, data science and machine learning — will be close to each other in the visualization. Skills that are less relevant to one another — like marketing and coding in Python — will be further away. As learners improve their scores in specific areas, they will see their scores increase in other connected skills.

Embracing the skills galaxy

Workera users will find that our Skills Galaxy makes it much easier to see and understand ability levels at a glance. After selecting a skill domain — Workera categories like Machine Learning and Generative AI that encompass hundreds of individual skills — users can click “explore skills” to see everything from their current levels to their assessment histories. The Skills Galaxy uses color and brightness to indicate ability levels: deep purple represents beginning skills; magenta represents developing skills; and yellow/orange represent accomplished skills. Colors will become brighter as the user’s skills improve.

This approach to visualization purposely avoids reds and greens — the colors that have historically been used to represent success and failure. By focusing instead on brightness (and colors that don’t cause negative emotions) we are able to inspire and motivate users to continue learning – signaling their skills by lightning them up!

Our Skills Galaxy goes beyond visualization to make two crucial improvements to the learning journey. A user’s skills aren’t laid out on a single straight line; instead, they’re laid out on a map that shows how skills are interconnected. This means that users can intuitively choose the starting point that makes sense to them: they can start with a weaker skill that they find particularly interesting, or a different skill that’s highly relevant to their work. The Skills Galaxy allows the user to chart their own path forward while ensuring the learning journey is effective.

Workera’s Skills Galaxy also gives organizations the flexibility to make changes to their priorities and learning pathways. The Skills Galaxy is highly compartmentalized, so organizations can quickly remove obsolete skills from a domain or introduce new skills. The result is a learning platform that always keeps up with the pace of change and allows users to see where they stand — even with new and emerging skills.

The world is changing quickly, and our ability to grow and succeed will depend on our learning velocity. Workera’s Skills Galaxy is a huge step forward to help users learn more quickly and reach their goals.