The Skill Flex section asks what skills you are looking to develop through the Permaculture Diploma. It may be skills you already have but would like to further hone, or skills you’ve always dreamed of developing but never had the motivation or opportunity.

What skills do you need to develop to achieve the goals and vision you articulated in the previous section?

My Skill Flex

I started out the skill flex process by doing a mind map. I separated the mind map into three distinct categories. The first category were skills I felt I had already acquired. I called this section “Current Skills”. Next I looked at skills I felt I had a little experience in but still want to dilate further. These I labeled “Intermediate Skills”. Lastly I thought about the skills that I feel mostly inexperience with and want to learn as part of my diploma process. This section I labeled “Skills to Develop”.

Current skills and intermediate skills all feed into the skills I would like to develop. There is always room for further growth.

Recognizing that all the skills I currently have are skills that I would like to continue to develop through the process of this diploma I fed the “Current Skills” and “Intermediate Skills” back through the “Skills to Develop” category. Then I started to look at the way each of the skills in a category linked with other skills in that same category.

All the skills link up with other skills in some way. This map helped me to see how these skills are connected.

After seeing the connections within each category I began to recognize connections between each category. This recognition resulted in the following mind map:

Skills are connected in many ways. Recognizing these connections can help me develop skills that I currently have no experience in by working through other skills.

As I spent more time to look at all the ways these skills interconnect and support each other I saw three major skill sets emerge. I decided to make another mind map to categorize all the skills around these three major skill sets. The skills sets are: Permaculture Design, Community Organizing and Business. The skills are organized into these categories as shown in the mind map below:

Organizing the Skills around these particular skill set categories gives me more clear picture of the direction I would like to take my Diploma process.

I continued to use the same color formating from the previous mind map categories to help me visualize the areas where I need the most growth within this new format. This mind map clarifies the skills that I am working to develop and how they contribute toward the goals of my diploma process as described in Goals Articulation section.

The Skill Flex process will be expanded upon further and broken down into individual skills in the Action Learning Pathway. The Action Learning Pathway with be the last major section of this design project and is a culmination of all the previous sections into a clear pathway through the next two years of Permaculture Diploma Accreditation.