Roles that share skills

Skills are defined once, organisation-wide — and roles overlap. A front-end developer and a designer both hold "accessibility basics"; a data analyst and a backend developer both hold "SQL." So when you stand two forests side by side, they share ground.

That shared ground is one of the quietly valuable reads in the whole method:

Sideways moves become visible. Someone eyeing a move from QA to backend development doesn't face a mystery — the overlap between the two forests shows what already transfers, and the difference shows exactly what they'd need to pick up, in prerequisite order. A career change becomes a gap analysis instead of a leap of faith.

Hidden versatility surfaces. People often hold skills their current role doesn't showcase. Mapping someone onto a different role's forest can reveal they're already halfway into it — useful when a team needs to staff a new kind of work quickly.

The organisation sees its connective tissue. Where many forests share the same skills, those skills are the org's common foundation — worth investing in training for, and worth watching, because a gap there is a gap everywhere at once.

None of this requires extra machinery. It's the payoff of two rules established long before: skills are defined once (so the same skill is the same skill in every forest), and prerequisites live on skills (so paths into new territory come pre-drawn). The overlap was always there; the forests just make it visible.

[Image — Midjourney prompt] watercolor illustration of two distinct forests meeting at a shared grove in the middle, trees from both sides intermingling in the overlap zone, a small path crossing from one forest through the shared grove into the other, two subtly different shades of green blending where they meet, warm linen palette background, hopeful crossing-over mood

we need a different prompt, it's too abstract for midjourney