Last time, we touched upon such problems of education as the scholastic approach to learning, and also talked a little about the vicious practice of training skills at the expense of gaining knowledge . Now it is time to discuss these two fundamental categories in more detail and understand what the fundamental difference between them is.
So, both definitions: skills and knowledge , as well as the term rules, much less commonly used in everyday life, in the form in which they are used by specialists in the field of personnel and personnel, were formulated almost 40 years ago by Jens Rasmussen in the work, which is called: “Skills, Rules and Knowledge; Signals, Signs and Symbols, and Other Distinctions in Human Performance Models. " Since then, the framework he developed has developed significantly, but we will rely on the original article, which can be found here . The document is available for a fee or by corporate / academic subscription, however, the poor but inquisitive reader will always find the opportunity to download this text for free.
It is interesting, but due to the fact that while the term rules usually falls outside the field of view, and skills and knowledge continue to be adjacent to each other, the false impression is often made that the latter two are synonyms. Meanwhile, in the taxonomy of Rasmussen, they were all given sufficiently clear definitions, and be sure that they should not be confused in any case.
In fact, exploring human behavior, Rasmussen assigns skills to the lowest and not too flattering level. With such a remarkable attribute as the automatism of sensory-motor activity in the absence of conscious control, it is very close to the elaborated complex conditioned reflexes:
The skill-based behavior represents sensory-motor performance during acts or activities which, following a statement of an intention, take place without conscious control as smooth, automated, and highly integrated patterns of behavior.Rasmussen sets the rules above the skills, although he makes a reservation that the line between them can be quite thin, especially when the skills are combined in chains. Their need arises when one simple skill is not enough in a specific situation and in order to achieve a result, it is necessary to group several skills, perform actions depending on the conditions, that is, follow the rules developed independently or obtained from someone else:
At the next level of rule-based behavior, the composition of such a sequence of subroutines in a familiar work situation is typically controlled by a stored rule or procedure which may have been derived empirically during previous occasions, communicated from other persons' know-how as instruction or a cookbook recipe, or it may be prepared on occasion by conscious problem solving and planning.In this list, you can safely enter all kinds of technical best-practices, white-papers and other how-tos, as well as without fail add the rules established by corporate management, including the rules introduced by the local team leader.
This pyramid is crowned with the knowledge that is acquired at the moment when the usual picture of the world collapses - neither skills nor following instructions help, but there is a need to study and study an unfamiliar problem in an unusual environment:
During unfamiliar situations, faced with an environment for which no know-how or rules for control are available from previous encounters, the control of performance must move to a higher conceptual level, in which performance is goal-controlled and knowledge-based. In this situation, the goal is explicitly formulated, based on an analysis of the environment and the overall aims of the person. Then a useful plan is developed-by selection-such that different plans are considered, and their effect tested against the goal, physically by trial and error, or conceptually by means of understanding the functional properties of the environment and prediction of the effects of the plan considered. At this level of functional reasoning, the internal structure of the system is explicitly represented by a “mental model" ...Just at this level, all the most interesting things are happening - business ideas, scientific theories and innovations are growing, as well as rules and techniques are formulated for lower levels, such as, for example, developing an Agile manifest.
In conclusion, you need to take the nasty pill number one. Some corporate managers, especially entry-level ones and some certified IT specialists, mistakenly believe that they are at the level of knowledge, because the former seem to make some decisions, while the latter seem to have passed exams and received the corresponding ranks of engineers. However, upon closer examination, it turns out that at best this is the upper bar of the rules level: managers operate on the same rules and regulations, often being unable to change the simplest corporate procedure. At the same time, many engineers over the years have been performing jagged, automated steps to configure and configure, install and decommission equipment, and writing instructions for beginners is considered the highest skill.
Here you should drink the vile pill number two. The modern world is built on the foundations of the industrial era, in which the attitude towards people as a technical resource with known characteristics of reliability and performance dominated. It is not surprising that the idea of a factory conveyor was transferred to various industries from medicine to information technology. It is also logical that in this paradigm, personnel are required to develop skills in order for employees to be able to maintain a given pace and keep up with the conveyor belt at the enterprise. From those who work on the assembly line, and even those who manage it, special knowledge is not required, skills and strict adherence to instructions are required here.
And the last bitter medicine number three is a direct result of the number two pill. The fact is that in a post-industrial society there is a tendency towards robotization and automation of production and services. In light of this, the traditional perfectly-regulated and understandable work of the skills and rules levels are wonderful targets for innovation: cloud technologies, courier robots, autopilots, etc., etc. “threaten” not only the metro driver or the store saleswoman, but equally to a certified IT engineer. Accordingly, many workers will have to acquire new skills and pursue fresh certificates, or make every effort and try to jump into the field of knowledge.
It is naive to contrast knowledge with skills, because as without a foundation it is impossible to build a reliable building, so without skills it is impossible to obtain and use knowledge. Paraphrasing the name of a famous magazine, we can say that skills are power, and knowledge is development. However, it is important to remember that by training only skills, we doom ourselves to work at the eternal conveyor and the only way to break out of this vicious circle and move forward is to gain knowledge.