---
name: skill-assessment
description: Judge someone's ability, including your own, through demonstrated performance rather than confidence or credentials. Use when hiring, mentoring, or deciding what to learn next.
---

# Skill assessment

Confidence correlates poorly with competence in both directions, and
self-assessment is least reliable at the extremes. Useful assessment
observes performance on representative work.

## Method

1. **Assess on realistic tasks.** Work resembling what the person will
   actually do, since abstract puzzles measure something else (see
   technical-interviews).
2. **Watch the process, not just the result.** How someone approaches an
   unfamiliar problem predicts future performance better than whether
   they solved this one.
3. **Probe the boundary.** Where their knowledge stops and whether they
   recognise it, since knowing what you do not know is the most
   transferable skill.
4. **Discount confidence.** Fluent explanation and correct explanation
   are different, and confidence is often inversely related to depth in
   novices.
5. **Use multiple signals.** A single assessment is noisy, and
   independent observations reduce the error (see agent-ensemble-voting).
6. **Assess against the level needed, not against yourself.** The
   question is whether they can do this work, not whether they match
   your approach.
7. **Give the assessment back.** An evaluation that never reaches the
   person cannot help them improve (see feedback-for-learning).

## Boundaries

Assessment predicts imperfectly, and interview performance correlates
loosely with job performance. Assessing people has fairness and legal
implications in employment contexts (see agent-people-ops-desk).
Self-assessment is unreliable and needs external calibration.