Mastery is not just what you know. It’s what you can do with what you know.
When 40-year-old Vozinha joined the Cape Verde national team in their 2026 World Cup opener against Spain, most people watching had no idea that he would become a breakout star of the tournament. It wasn’t until he shut out Spain with seven incredible saves and stood against football legend Messi in the Argentina game that fans recognized what his coaches had clearly seen.
Did this happen miraculously? Probably not. More likely, Vozinha brought his A-game through a combination of talent, hard work, and coaches who recognized his potential. Head coach Bubista made him greater by spotting his distinct skills (elite ability to anticipate where shots will land and stay composed, in his case) and building a team that was compatible with those skills.
Who are the breakout stars already on your roster? How do you spot them on your team and in the hiring process?
See Skills More Clearly
Skillspotting is the practice of identifying skills strengths, skills gaps, and how they map to business needs. It helps businesses build smarter teams, make better hiring decisions, and move people internally where they’ll thrive.
If you look historically, the way that most organizations try to do this is with some form of inference. They’re looking at people’s job titles, their resumes, their work histories and assuming, ‘hey, since you had this role, you must have this skill. I bet you can do it now.’
At the beginning of the 2026 World Cup tournament, no one knew what to expect from the small nation of Cape Verde. Fans and evaluators probably expected goalkeeping headlines to come from names like Portugal’s Diogo Costa. He was the obvious, inferred pick with his proven track record at the highest level of professional football. In comparison, Vozinha was a 40-year-old playing in Portugal’s second division whom most evaluators wrote off entirely.
But titles and history don’t tell you who is ready for the next version of the job. That’s the piece that’s so important today in the AI era, because jobs are changing faster than ever. And that changes what companies need from people.
Build Around Your Team’s Skills
Skillspotting makes it possible to find the skills and the people that will evolve the job.
The best coaches do not have fixed mindsets of what every position on their team should look like. Instead, they see their teams as something more fluid. They understand the players they have, where their strengths are, where the gaps are, and how to build better systems.
There are certainly people on your team who are going above and beyond their original job descriptions, like the executive assistant who became the de facto AI enabler or the engineer who started learning about accessibility design on the side.
If you cannot see those skills, you cannot develop them or deploy them. That means missing out on people who can help your team adapt and reach its goals.
Start with the Individual
Seeing those skills starts by knowing where each individual on your team stands.
What if the actual work could speak for itself? No need to guess areas for improvement or keep a list of ‘wins’ somewhere that inevitably gets forgotten about. Skills intelligence comes from assessing evidence of skill across tools where employees already do their everyday work.
Then turn those insights into a skills profile that helps them understand where they excel, where they need to improve, and what to work on next. That profile might diagnose a skill gap around something like handling objections on customer calls, then actually recommend an opportunity to practice that specific skill with an AI role-play. This gives people targeted opportunities to build the skills with context that is specific to them.
On the employer side, those insights are like striking gold. Analyzing that data means you can understand where you have deep capability, where people are still developing, and which skills to double down on to reach your goals.
Build Your Team Like a Great Coach
We can only build the future of work if we think like great coaches: with a skills-first mindset. Who is ready to play today? Who can grow into the player the team needs next? The same should be true for all talent at work.
Then comes the question of how people get better. Every single skill—whether it’s reading the soccer field and making the right pass or handling a difficult customer conversation—is learned through practice and repetition. That means moving beyond one-size-fits-all generic training and instead giving people development opportunities that are specific to where they are and where they want to go next.
The future of work won’t be built by relying on past experience, rigid job descriptions, or guessing who has potential. Greatness across the organization will be built by skillspotting: seeing what people can do, understanding where the gaps and opportunities are, and helping them get better—one skill at a time.