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Choosing a path
The forest shows every possible path. Yours needs choosing — and five principles do most of the c...
Reading your forest
Your role is a forest; this chapter is about walking it. First, learn to read the map from where ...
What a forest review changes
A forest review is gardening, and it makes exactly three kinds of change. Walking in knowing this...
Validation at scale
Assessing a handful of people honestly is a discipline. Assessing fifty — while levels feed revie...
Failure modes
Every assessment source has a bias signature. Knowing them is most of the defence — and it's why ...
Placing a person on the levels
The method lives or dies on honest assessment — and the levels are built to make honesty achievab...
When roles don't fit
Some teams are too varied for fixed ladders. A small agency where everyone wears three hats, a re...
The forest
A forest is a group of trees — the full scope of knowledge for a single role. "Front End Develope...
Trees as areas of knowledge
A tree is a scope of view over a connected group of skills — an area of knowledge that forms a lo...
Granularity — how big is a skill?
Cut skills too big and people stall on them for a year; too small and the forest becomes confetti...
The three levels
The three levels are the load-bearing definitions of the whole method — everything from self-asse...
Two kinds of skill
Every skill in a forest is one of exactly two kinds. The split answers a simple question: is ther...
The skill as building block
Everything in a forest is made of skills. A skill is one concrete ability: something you can do, ...
The problems it solves
Most organisations manage skills through a fog. The information exists — in people's heads, scatt...
Where it comes from
In early 2020, the question was simple: professional competencies relate to each other in complex...
What Skillforests is
Skillforests is a way of managing skills that borrows its best idea from video games: the skill t...
Glossary
Every term in the method, in one place. Terms link to the page that treats them fully. Skill — th...
Roles that share skills
Skills are defined once, organisation-wide — and roles overlap. A front-end developer and a desig...
How to read this book
The book has two parts, and the split is deliberate. Part I (chapters 1–6) is the shared foundati...