Have you ever wished that you could organize your skills and knowledge in a way that makes sense to you, like a video game character leveling up? The idea of mapping skills and knowledge onto a tree is not new; in fact, the metaphor of a tree has been used throughout history to represent knowledge, learning, and even the root of the word “truth”. At Gobekli, we believe that designing a human-centered experience means finding a way to map skills and knowledge in a way that is intuitive and meaningful to everyone. That’s why we created the Master Skill Tree in our Universal Talent Passport (UTP) app.

The Master Skill Tree is a visual representation of a person’s skills, interests, motivations, and more. It is inspired by the 7 chakras and the Kabbalah tree of life, which have been used for centuries to map the metaphysical human. By overlaying these two metaphors and translating them into buckets of talent data, we have created a way for people to see their skills and knowledge in a new light.

The nodes of the Master Skill Tree are: Abilities, Motivations, Interests, Hard Skills, Soft Skills, Reputation, Journey, Voice, Domain, Leadership, Stewardship, and Potential. Each node represents a different aspect of a person’s skills and knowledge, and clicking on a node reveals data visualizations that represent the talent in that area.

The Master Skill Tree is populated by evidence that has been contextualized by our Standardized Talent Asset Mapping Protocol (STAMP). STAMP is a next-generation skill tagging methodology that organizes skill tags in a JSON-LD file to scale and contextualize the skills described. This scaling of talent data allows differences between experiences that otherwise sound similar to be visualized. By combining talent data from different sources and stacking it into one graph database inside the Universal Talent Passport, we can power dynamic data visualizations and our conversational AI, Pythia.

Pythia guides users to understand and explore the Master Skill Tree, helping them to better understand themselves and identify opportunities for growth and representation. The Master Skill Tree is an important part of the UTP app because it helps users first know themselves in a way they’ve never seen before, making their invisible qualities visible to themselves.

The Master Skill Tree is a unique and valuable feature of the Universal Talent Passport app. By visualizing skills and knowledge in a way that is intuitive and meaningful, the Master Skill Tree helps people to better understand themselves and their potential. The app, guided by Pythia, provides a comprehensive and personalized way to organize and present verified talent data, CLRs/LERs, and other credentials, making it easier for people to own and control their talent data record. We are proud to be part of a growing ecosystem of organizations like JFF.org, Velocity Network, US Chamber of Commerce t3 innovation network, credential engine and 1Edtech that are working to create a system of trust for the future of work.