ABSTRACT
The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD, 2012) defines a skill as a bundle of knowledge, attributes, and capacities that can be learned and that enable individuals to successfully and consistently perform an activity or task. With this in mind, and considering the focus of this chapter on skills development, a useful definition of skills is likely to be limited to various individual differences that can be developed and trained and that tend to lead to important work outcomes like productivity and personal well-being. As illustrated above in the discussion of the definition of skills, a major barrier to productive collaboration on international skills development by various actors is the lack of a common conceptual understanding of skills and meaningful agreement on the major dynamics of skills development within society. In this final section, we provide practical recommendations in light of the proposed skill development framework and the potential for detailed information about skills to promote human development.
