Merita Consulting

Skills First

In the ever-evolving landscape of business, one truth remains constant: a company is only as strong as its workforce. This is where skills-first hiring and promoting come to the forefront, offering a means to fill positions and a catalyst for driving your company’s growth. When you strategically hire for skills, you open doors to enhanced innovation, heightened productivity, and an overall surge in business success.

Skill Definitions

Determining the skills for each role is a critical first step in building an adaptive workforce. These definitions are the foundation for your job descriptions, job postings, career pathways, and workforce development programs, all of which provide the platform for implementing a skills-first hiring and promotion program.



Skills Assessments

Skills assessments are crucial to the skills-based hiring process. They are the litmus test that helps employers determine if a candidate’s abilities align with the role’s requirements. Yet evaluating technical skills alone is not enough.

You must embrace a holistic approach to skills assessments to find the perfect fit for your team.


DEC’s Ken Olsen, father of the minicomputer

Posted on by Dwayne Nesmith

Ken Olsen, the co-founder and Ceo of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), is dead at 84.  In so many ways, Ken represented the best of US entrepreneurship. He took on the “nobody gets fired for buying IBM” head on and with a better mousetrap created a valuable business with energetic, talented employees and an extremely loyal customer following. Some of my first programming was on a DEC PDP-11.

Ken was a personable, visionary able to attract talented people and get the best from them.  His flat organization was noted as a wonderful place to work and allowed thousands of people to pursue their passion both inside DEC and all along the 128 Corridor.

I’m afraid Ken will be remember less for his spot-on prediction of the minicomputer market than for his equally wrong prediction for desktop computers.  Dismissing them as toys, he steered DEC away from so long, they were too far behind to catch up by the time they changed direction.

How did a company with such a clear vision of individual capabilities and freeing the business from the power of IT miss the largest power shift up until that time in computer history?  In so many ways, Olsen and DEC demonstrate the power and weakness of a visionary leader.  Rumors from the old mill DEC used as headquarters,  suggest the company had a “Ken said” mentality.  Every decision was based on what the people around the table thought “Ken said”.  Great when Ken’s experience and view of the market were right, but way wrong when the views of those closer to the PC market were ignored.