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Skillforests is a way of managing skills that borrows its best idea from video games: the skill tree. Instead of job descriptions full of adjectives and reviews full of vibes, every role gets a forest — a living map of all the skills that role needs, how they ...

In early 2020, the question was simple: professional competencies relate to each other in complex ways — could those relations be drawn as a graph that's actually easy to understand? Games had already solved this. Path of Exile, the Diablo series, Skyrim — all...

Most organisations manage skills through a fog. The information exists — in people's heads, scattered across CVs and review documents — but nobody can see it. The forest replaces the fog with a map, and a few chronic problems dissolve on contact. Reviews made ...

The book has two parts, and the split is deliberate. Part I (chapters 1–6) is the shared foundation. It defines the building blocks — skills, levels, trees, roots, forests, ranks — and the two disciplines that keep a forest trustworthy: honest assessment and r...

Everything in a forest is made of skills. A skill is one concrete ability: something you can do, demonstrate, and — crucially — name precisely. Precision is the whole game. "I know marketing" tells you nothing; it's a continent, not a skill. But break it down ...

A prerequisite is a skill you need before another skill becomes learnable. You can't write media queries before you know CSS basics; you can't run an email campaign before you can write one email. Prerequisites are how the forest knows the order of things — th...

Every skill in a forest is one of exactly two kinds. The split answers a simple question: is there anything meaningful to grade? No-level skills (yes/no). Some abilities are small enough that you either know them or you don't. Media queries are the classic exa...

The three levels are the load-bearing definitions of the whole method — everything from self-assessment to promotion runs through them. They're written so you can place yourself without guessing. Beginner. You know the basics — say, right after an online cours...

Cut skills too big and people stall on them for a year; too small and the forest becomes confetti. The method uses a single rule of thumb: Progressing a skill by one step should take roughly a month, up to about three. That's the whole rule. It gives you two t...

A tree is a scope of view over a connected group of skills — an area of knowledge that forms a logical part of a larger whole. Take a front-end developer. Their full role covers a lot of ground, but the ground has natural regions: Testing, Frameworks, JavaScri...

Inside a tree, the prerequisite chains from the skills page become visible paths. Arrows run from each prerequisite up to the skill it unlocks, so the tree isn't just a grouping — it's a route map. Reading one is mostly instinct once you know two conventions: ...

Every tree has roots — the skills you must already hold before you can enter the tree. And here's the elegant part: you never place roots by hand. The tree grows its own. The derivation is mechanical. Look at the lowest skills in the tree — the ones whose prer...

A forest is a group of trees — the full scope of knowledge for a single role. "Front End Developer" is a forest. Its trees (Testing, Frameworks, JavaScript/TypeScript, Styling/CSS) are the logical slices; the forest is the whole territory. The default shape: o...

A forest maps a role's knowledge; ranks map the journey through it. A rank is a seniority level — junior / mid / senior by default — and each rank is defined as a concrete set of skills, at given levels, that a person at that rank is expected to hold. The key ...

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 s...

Some teams are too varied for fixed ladders. A small agency where everyone wears three hats, a research group, a startup where "the role" changes quarterly — forcing a junior/mid/senior forest onto teams like these produces a map nobody recognises. The method ...

The method lives or dies on honest assessment — and the levels are built to make honesty achievable. They're defined by observable behaviour: not "how good is this person?" but "what happens when they do the work?" The tells, level by level: Beginner — the wor...

Every assessment source has a bias signature. Knowing them is most of the defence — and it's why the method prefers levels that several sources can confirm. Inflation. A level claimed (or granted) above the behaviour. It feels harmless, even kind — until the m...