Once upon a time people undertook specialized training and learning to equip them for long careers doing similar tasks. In that world, they rarely needed refreshers, up-skilling, cross-skilling or new careers. Learning lasted a lifetime.

In this world of rapid and unceasing scientific and technological development, once-and-done learning is a luxury no one can afford. On the other hand, simply trying to fill people’s heads with more facts offers diminishing returns. The increase in knowledge is now so rapid that those facts become outdated very quickly.

This progress has shifted attention to the construct of meta-skills or competencies that enable effective functioning in a changing world. Meta-skills – knowing how to learn, for instance, or being capable of changing one’s mind, or knowing how to harness input from multiple people – have become desirable workplace capabilities in addition to pure domain knowledge.

Social and emotional skills have similarly grown in value as organizations and communities become ever more dense networks of interconnected knowledge, relationships, ideas and actions. Investing in meta-skills and social competencies offer a path through turbulent and fast-changing environments. This is pertinent to the challenges leaders face when it comes to staffing their teams and organizations.

To address such challenges, we must ask which human features:

Many terms have been used to describe the broad class of skills or competencies that underpin learning and effective performance. Common phrases such as non-cognitive skills, soft skills, life skills, essential skills, workplace competencies, or social-emotional learning have all been used to describe what the OECD called:

"Individual capacities that can be (a) manifested in consistent patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviours, (b) developed through formal and informal learning experiences, and (c) important drivers of socio-economic outcomes throughout the individual’s life."(Chernyshenko, Kankaras & Drasgow, 2018).

Despite the different names, it is clear that developing such non-technical skills help individuals gain more from their lives, communities to experience greater well-being, and countries to do better (Heckman & Kautz, 2012).

Inherent in the idea of skills are two key features. First, a skill must be malleable. Specifically, someone can adjust or change their capability through various interactions and learning – formal, informal, self-education, coaching and so on. Secondly, skills are inherently desirable – they are better to have than not have.

The question remains, what skills should we pay attention to and how can we reliably measure them?

To structure a parsimonious and efficient summary of social and emotional skills, the Big Five dimensions of personality (i.e., agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, emotional stability, and openness to experience) has emerged as the most used taxonomy (Strus & Cieciuch, 2017).

Personality traits are characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that tend to be consistent over time and between relevant situations. They are cognitive, affective, and behavioral tendencies: what a particular person tends to do, averaged across situations (Soto, Napolitano, & Roberts, 2020). Personality traits can be thought of as critically important underpinnings of skills, which can be viewed as capacities: what a person is capable of doing when the situation calls for it.

To help individuals gain a deep awareness of their Big Five personality dimensions, we developed the Core Drivers Diagnostic as a reliable and valid psychometric assessment and development tool.

Numerous empirical studies have shown that social and emotional skills in various Big Five domains are related to employment outcomes. For example:

Similarly, social and emotional skills belonging to different Big Five domains are shown to be related to person’s physical and mental health and various health-related behaviors (Strickhouser, Zell and Krizan, 2017). For example, skills in the conscientiousness domain are related to a range of health behaviors including safe driving, healthy eating, and substance use, as well as physical and mental health, (Bogg and Roberts, 2004). Lower levels of skills from conscientiousness and emotional regulation domains are also found to be related with antisocial, aggressive, and rule-breaking behaviors (Tackett, 2006).

For these reasons we conclude that the Big Five personality model constitutes an appropriate basis for a competency model relating to real-world skills and outcomes. Below we review three well researched and validated Big Five based categorizations of social and emotional skills: The OECD model of Social and Emotional skills; The Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory, and The Great Eight. We also review an innovative circumplex methodology proposing meta-traits which serve as combinations of the Big Five.

Although aimed at assessing children and adolescent skills, the OCED model of Social and Emotional Skills (OCED, 2021) has been influential in showing how social skills influence a broad spectrum of life outcomes. The framework is based on extensive literature reviews and rigorous empirical findings. The framework is conceptually aligned with the Big Five model. The Social & Emotional Skills framework focuses on a facet dimensions of social and emotional skills rather than on the broader Big Five dimensions, since these:

The OECD Study on Social & Emotional skills used the Big Five to structure their taxonomy of 15 skills as illustrated below.

Attempting to bring consistency to a plethora of competing models, Soto and colleagues (Soto, Napolitano, Sewell, Yoon & Roberts, 2022) proposed an empirical test of outcomes. Their model described specific social and emotional skills organized in five major domains that parallel the Big Five traits in terms of their social, emotional, and behavioral referents, but are defined in terms of people’s functional capacities (i.e., skills) rather than their general tendencies (i.e., traits). These are:

Soto and colleagues showed that skill domains and their facets converge in meaningful ways with socio-emotional competencies, character, and personality traits. Further, these predict consequential outcomes including academic achievement and engagement, occupational interests, social relationships, and well-being.

In the much more specific domain of work, SHL developed a comprehensive competency framework designed to relate to the Big Five personality dimensions (Kurz & Bartram, 2002). This approach adopts a three-tier structure: a bottom tier consisting of a set of 110 component competencies that defines relationships between these components; these map on to a set of 20 competency dimensions; which in turn load on to eight broad “competency factors”. The Great Eight and the associated competency dimensions are listed below.

Comprehensive analyses of competency data from many organizations support the view that variance in competency can be accounted for by eight broad factors, which in turn can be measured by the underpinning Big Five personality and measures of cognitive ability (Bartram, 2005).

Based on the Two Factor Model of personality, Cieciuch and Strus (2017) developed a model that describes the basic mechanisms underlying personality dynamics in terms of eight meta-traits, blended from Big Five constructs. The utility of this work lies in its suggestion that combinations of Big Five constructs can empirically describe the mechanisms that Bartram (2002) and Soto et al (2022) suggested underpin their conceptualization of social and emotional skills.

Our comparative analysis highlights the considerable congruence between models and underscores the value of the Big Five personality constructs as a foundational taxonomy. Combined, the models provide a firm basis for identifying a set of social and emotional competencies shown to be relevant for the world of work and predictive of success in career, relationships and wellbeing. Further, these models provide an evidential basis in supporting the common commercial practice of combining trait scores to better map competency behaviors or “capabilities”.

To develop the Deeper Signals Capability model, two PhD level organizational psychologists abstracted descriptions of the competencies described above and highlighted commonalities. These were coded independently and the subsequent list reduced. A third psychologist independently reviewed the list and discrepancies were tabled and resolved. The resulting list was further coded to produce a simple conceptual framework relevant to business and work settings. Finally, we mapped the behavioral indicators for each competency at three organizational levels: leading self, leading others, leading projects. This helps organizations map appropriate capabilities to job roles. The six capability domains and the associated competencies are listed below.

Table 3: Describing each of the competencies in the Deeper Signals Capability Model

The Deeper Signals Capability model can be accurately measured using the Core Drivers and Core Values Diagnostics. Using bespoke scoring algorithms shaped by meta-analysis and validation research, we can offer organizations accurate insights on the social and behavioral skills of their employees, teams and leaders. Powered by the Deeper Signals platform, we can use such insights to power bespoke feedback reports, development journeys and analytic dashboards to level up your talent.

If your organization already has a competency model, our team of I/O psychologists will work with you to customize the Deeper Signals capability model and map it onto your own framework. There are two steps to adapting our capability model:

Based on the gathered insights we will have the necessary information to develop your custom competency framework, and create interpretative behavioral profiles for individual contributors, managers and senior executives.

With the competencies defined and mapped, we will develop custom scoring algorithms using dimensions from the Core Drivers and Core Values assessments — scientific, reliable and unbiased assessment tools. All custom scoring algorithms will be tested to ensure that there is no adverse-impact against protected groups (i.e. age, gender, ethnicity), and where possible, evidence of concurrent and predictive validity will be shared.

The Deeper Signals platform will provide HR leaders and managers with real-time competency insights. Upon completion of the assessments, data-dashboards will offer interactive tools to: