KSA's: Part 1

It’s post WWII America, and you’re a hiring manager in the US federal government. Super exciting work. You’re hiring a ton of new people to various positions who all have a lot of similar-looking resumes. You want to be sure they can do the work, but you’re finding it hard to see enough of a difference between applicants. What do you do?

It’s the US government, so obviously you create more paperwork and make the hiring process slower. Instead of just asking for a resume, you start asking for a story, an essay, basically, from each candidate detailing what comes to be known as a KSA statement.

KSA meaning Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities.

This seems logical enough. Using the KSA, you weed out people that don’t want to put in the work of the essay, and you get top candidates at the peak of the KSA pyramid, having all the attributes you could ever ask for within a particular job. In theory, this should have been revolutionary within the hiring process. In practice, well, here’s how one historian described the KSA statement:

“They were time-consuming to write, miserable to read, and many folks believed they encouraged applicants to lie about, sorry, embellish their qualifications.”

So the KSA didn’t even meet its own requirements! It didn’t gain more knowledge about job applicants, it didn’t lead to a skill of streamlining the hiring process, and it didn’t show the ability to be inviting the best people. Epic fail!

But, with all that said, the KSA can still be super useful if we change our perspective on it a bit. See, it's not about evaluating talent using an ancient, unhelpful method. It’s about learning where you’re at and focusing on the right aspect of your performance at the right time. So, this week's Thousand Word Thursday is part 1 of a 3 part series. Each part is going to answer the question: How do we transform the KSA model from an instrument of evaluation, to an instrument of personal development?

Part 1: If you can’t beat ‘em, outsmart ‘em.

Mike Brosseau signed with the Tampa Bay Rays in 2016 as an undrafted free-agent. Basically, he was given the chance to be a roster-filler for a season or so before the team would likely release him and he would start his real-world job. So, the likelihood that Brosseau would find himself coming up to the plate in a deciding game 5 in the 2020 AL Division series against the NY Yankees star closer, Aroldis Chapman, was, let’s just say, low. But that’s exactly where he found himself on an October night in a tie-game in a mostly empty stadium that wasn’t in New York or Tampa, actually, because you know, covid.

So let me paint more of this picture for you. You have Mike Brosseau, a 5-10, undrafted free agent playing in his 2nd major league season facing Aroldis Chapman, 6-4 pitcher who holds the MLB record for fastest pitch ever recorded at 105.1 miles per hour, was a 6 time all-star playing in his 10th major league season, and had plenty of post-season experience between his time with the Cubs and Yankees. If the US government is having Brosseau and Chapman walk us through their KSA qualifications to compete in this situation, who do you think wins that battle?

Now, I could spend 20,000 words describing Bross, but no one wants to read 20k Word Thursdays, so I’ll jump to the lesson here. First off, Bross would be the first to tell you that his skill and baseball ability is nothing like Chapman’s. He would probably tell you that his skill and baseball ability don’t match up to most major league pitchers. And that’s exactly the point here. Brosseau, because he realized coming into his pro baseball career that there were going to be many others who’s skill and ability were above his, learned to rely on his knowledge to help him compete. He knew that knowing more than his opponents was going to be the separating factor, or at least the equalizing factor.

So, on the 10th pitch, in that 8th inning at-bat against Chapman, on a 102 mile per hour pitch, Brosseau wasn’t trying to pretend he had more ability than Chapman. What Brosseau WAS trying to do, through hours and hours of “doing his homework” as he has called it, was outwit Chapman, and predict exactly which pitch was coming and where it would be.

But don't take my word for it, see for yourself.

You see, no one needs to be the total package of knowledge, skills, and abilities when it comes to success. They just need to be the right package, and learn where their personal success is most likely to come from.

I realized something important here as I was putting this part of the story together for this week. The KSA model seemed to be so hated because it didn’t paint a helpful picture in an efficient way to make it useful.

Part of my goal here is to take terms that may otherwise be glossed over or tossed aside, and turn those into something that can be easily remembered, and readily utilized in your world.

So let’s not rush that process. There’s more to learn here. There are more stories to tell within the KSA model. We’ve seen what a pursuit of knowledge can do when skills and abilities may not stack up. Tune in next week for a journey into the world of skill-building, through the lens of one of my favorite stories to tell.

What could it be?