Cover Image: Real example of a skill tree

3 steps to build the best skill trees to raise your self-awareness, channel your focus, and guide your learning

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When I started having a deep interest in Education, I interviewed hundreds of people across a wide variety of fields asking this very question:

What are your current pain points when it comes to Education?

They told me these are their pain points:

It’s hard to learn
It’s unclear what to learn currently and going forward
It’s hard to find the right resources to achieve your learning goals
It’s unclear how to measure progress towards your learning goals
It’s difficult to figure out how to practically apply knowledge acquired
Finding the right purpose for learning is sometimes ambiguous
It’s hard to catalog information for later retrieval and retention
It’s hard to stay consistent with the application of knowledge
The sense of community is going away (outside of schools)
It’s costly
It’s lacking proper mentorship
It’s unclear how to measure the impact of what you’re learning
It’s difficult to cater to people’s different learning abilities

Do you agree with these pain points? What would you change from the list?

One approach that I’ve been using for almost 2 years now is to build skill trees. The featured image of this article is one such tree. Skill trees are aimed at fixing the five bolded pain points from above.

In this article, we’re going to answer the following questions: (1) what are skill trees, (2) why use them, and (3) how to make them for yourself?

What is a skill tree?

A skill tree is a visual representation of sub-skills required to learn a larger skill. It’s an ongoing document where you record your progress and learning material.

Here are some examples:

Riding a bicycle

Playing the Ukulele — Beginner

Why skill trees?

Skill trees help address the five pain points previously mentioned in three different ways, they: (1) raise your self-awareness, (2) channel your focus, and (3) guide your learning.

Raise your self-awareness

By raising your self-awareness, skill trees address the following pain points:

It’s unclear what to learn currently
It’s unclear how to measure progress towards your learning goals

Skill trees raise your self-awareness because they force you to go deep into the sub-skills you’ve previously acquired and those you need to learn. When you build your skill tree, you map out all the sub-skills required, as well as your current proficiency level in each of them.

A good practice is to also list the pre-requisites before even starting. A very simple example for Cycling could be to include the sub-skills of Walking, Balancing, and Leg Coordination.

If you can’t walk, good luck cycling! You also need a certain level of proficiency in balancing your weight and in coordinating your legs. Without these, you won’t be able to ride a bicycle.

Channel your focus

Once you’ve mapped everything out and you know how good you are at the different sub-skills, you can start to understand where your time should be focused.

By channeling your focus, skill trees address the following pain point:

It’s unclear what to learn going forward

A rule I like to use to figure out where I should focus on my skill tree is the 80/20 rule (Pareto Principle). At its most simple, the 80/20 rule means doing 20 percent of the actions that lead to 80 percent of the results.

The first step is to figure out the results you’re looking for.

When I set out to learn to play the Ukulele, my goal was to learn to play Over the Rainbow. During my research, I found out that it uses only five chords and the Island strumming pattern. If I learn these five chords and strumming pattern, I should be 80 percent equipped to learn to play Over the Rainbow.

You should do that for every skill you set out to learn.

Guide your learning

Once you know where to channel your focus, you can start planning and executing.

By guiding your learning, skill trees address the following pain points:

It’s difficult to figure out how to practically apply knowledge acquired
It’s hard to catalog information for later retrieval and retention
It’s difficult to figure out how to practically apply knowledge acquired

The skill trees I linked above are simple examples. What you want to add to them is the learning material you’ll use or have used. These can be obtained with a Google search like these:

How to learn…
Best way to learn…
… for beginner/intermediate/expert

From the results, note the different resources you think might be useful in your learning. If you have access to experts on the skills you want to learn, ask them as well. You may want to also scour dedicated forums too.

I recommend balancing your learning between reading, watching videos, and doing a lot of practice.

How to build a skill tree

In a previous article, I touched on the origins of the theory, as well as how to build skill trees on paper. If you’d rather do it on paper, please check it out. If you’d rather watch how to build skill trees, please check out this video I made about it or watch this replay of the February 2020 SkillUp workshop.

This article will focus on how to build skill trees using mind mapping tools. The one I’m currently using is MindMeister.com.

Here are the three steps required to build a high-quality skill tree:

Step 1. List the concepts, facts, and procedures

In Ultralearning, Scott H. Young defines the terms this way:

Concepts: Anything that needs to be understood.
Facts: Anything that needs to be memorized.
Procedures: Anything that needs to be practiced.

Before you set out to build the tree for the first time, try to get the big picture by listing anything you can come up with. Divide it into three columns:

Involve other people in the exercise and be sure to do as much research with the help of Google (see above) and Youtube.

For example, in the workshops I do, we always come up with a lot more ideas when in a group. We spend two minutes brainstorming individually, then we regroup and share our ideas. It’s amazing the things others think of that you haven’t thought of and vice versa.

Doing this exercise with others always gives you more clarity. If you can’t find anyone to do it with, feel free to join our online version of the SkillUp workshop.

Step 2. Build the tree

My skill trees usually look something like that to start with:

If we reconstruct the Riding a Bicycle skill from above, it would look like this to start with:

A first draft of the Riding a Bicycle skill

By analyzing the skill tree above, I’m sure you can recognize some patterns. You can see that different things might make sense to group together. In a previous workshop, we grouped things together this way:

Doesn’t this look more organized already?

One thing I like to do is keep the procedures/actions on the right. These are the sub-skills you’ll be practicing. I leave the concepts and the facts on the left. These are the things you’ll study and research before and during your practice.

I like to add an extra step here: highlight what you want to focus on. My strategy is to dedicate 15 hours of time to learn a new skill every month. When I look at my skill tree, I try to identify what I think I can learn within 15 hours of study and practice.

See the difference:

Highlighting will help you channel your focus on the right things to study or practice while being aware of the other things you might be required to learn later on or have learned already.

Step 3. Self-assess and share

The last step is very important. Now that you have a skeleton for what the skill looks like once broken down, you want to rate yourself on your proficiency on each node. I use a scale from 0–4:

0 = I know nothing about it
1 = I’m a beginner
2 = I’m good
3 = I’m very good
4 = I have nothing else to learn

Here’s an example:

My strategy is to go from the last layers first. For the parent node, I simply average the sub-nodes’ score. Let’s analyze this one as an example:

I first started with Steering, Balance, etc. Once all of those were ranked, I jumped to Visual-motor skills and applied simple math:

(2 + 2 + 1 + 3 + 2 + 3) / 6 = ~2

So I put 2. I average up or down on gut feeling mostly.

Here are two more ideas you can think of:

Share the template with your friends, spouse, coworker or family and ask them to rate you on the different sub-skills. Sometimes what we think of ourselves isn’t what others think of us.
Make two versions for yourself: (1) where you are right now and (2) where you want to be after your practice or study.

Summary

Learning new skills can be fun and painless.

In the two years I’ve been using skill trees and have seen others use them, I know they help with the following pain points, identified over hundreds of interviews:

It’s unclear what to learn currently and going forward
It’s hard to find the right resources to achieve your learning goals
It’s unclear how to measure progress towards your learning goals
It’s difficult to figure out how to practically apply knowledge acquired
It’s hard to catalog information for later retrieval and retention

In addition to being fun to build and maintain, skills trees help you in three ways:

They raise your self-awareness
They channel your focus
They guide your learning

Once you get used to it, they’re not that difficult to build. You can build them using these 3 steps:

List the concepts, facts, and procedures
Build the tree
Self-assess and share

I hope this approach helps you learn the skills you’ve always wanted as it did for me. I learned things I thought I could never learn, like drawing, dancing salsa, composing music, and playing the ukulele, just to name a few. Not bad for a programmer!

You too can finally learn the skills you’ve always wanted to learn. Building your skill tree is the first step. You have to follow through after. I’ve built SkillUp Academy so you can learn alongside other motivated learners like you. Feel free to join, stay accountable, and learn more about learning!

You can do this!

“Think things through, then follow through” — Eddy Rickenbacker