Foundational Skills Are The Strategic Imperative, Study Finds

From programming built on math to negotiation rooted in critical thinking, the workplace rewards nested hierarchies of knowledge. For leaders and learners alike, investing in foundational skills is the true strategy for long-term growth.

In the relentless pursuit of competitive advantage, economies in the modern world, constantly in need of efficiency and innovation, have put an indisputable value on specialized skills and complex knowledge. We have carefully listed these proficiencies, tending to think of human capital as an aggregate of separate competences, a portfolio of diverse but unrelated skills.

However, stop for a second to reflect – what is more fundamental? What if the actual leverage – the invisible architecture – are not the discrete skills themselves, but rather their highly intricate and asymmetrical interdependencies?

A recent analysis cited in Nature magazine, careful inferencing skill dependencies out of asymmetrical conditional probabilities, is a real eye-opener: human capital has never been a flat terrain, but a deep-lying network. Not as a tossed-up pile of poker chips – each chip a skill – but rather a well-built pyramid.

Advanced, highly specialized skills are often constructed on larger and more general ones. Mastering calculus, for example, requires sound, sure understanding of algebra and geometry. This simple analogy unearths a startling fact that has massive impacts on career patterns, wage differentials and even the limitations to upward mobility within a highly complicated economy.

The Hidden Architecture of Expertise

The new framework, constructed on top of comprehensive U.S. labor force surveys and millions of occupational transitions, reveals a hierarchy in which certain occupations routinely fork from a base layer of knowledge.

Think of the ideal software engineer, a model of specialized expert knowledge. According to the research, their high level of programming, while certainly a very useful talent of itself, finds real potential for growth only through its foundation of general abilities, namely, an effective mathematical background, systems analysis and sharp deductive and inductive reasoning. Absent these, having this specialized skill, which in itself would still continue to exist, would be somewhat less potent in the market.

‘General skills’ – encompassing everything from language and the spoken word to social understanding and critical thought – are widely used, even unequivocal to a very broad ladder of occupations. They are not the nice-to-haves, but the pre-requisites on which more complex professional development is based.

The research approach consists of a simple methodology: by examining the asymmetric conditional probability of skills co-occurring in job requirements, one can see the direction of dependency. Since the probability of math requirement is much greater with programming skills than programming requirements with math skills, researchers conclude a directional dependency: math first – programming second. It is in this way that the “nested skill-occupation hierarchy” gains empirical piquancy.

The Widening Chasm

This is the perhaps important point that any aspiring leader or talent strategist must consider: foundation skills are linked both with higher education and higher economic reward. In other words, the market in its discerning wisdom does not merely reward specialization; it rewards specialization constructed on a sound basis. It’s akin to investing heavily on a high-performance engine for a race car, but pairing it with a weak chassis.

Likewise, high returns from specialized knowledge in the market are essentially conditional upon the acquisition and sustainability of a high degree of general skills. ‘Soft’ skills such as managerial and social skills squarely belong to the category of general skills and, in fact, have a superior payoff in the labor market.

The grace of this framework questions the old linear progression model, whereby general skills need to be developed along with specific ones, vindicating the constant sharpening of their dependent and more localized counterparts during the course of a career. Critical thinking, for example, isn’t just a doorway to negotiation, it is also crucial in advancing within that role.

Another salient finding of the study is this: the nested architecture of human capital has actually intensified during the last two decades, solidifying arteries, and maybe resulting in greater future obstacles to vertical job movement to those without underlying general core skills. This tendency will result in an ever-widening gap, in which so-called nested-specific skills flourish, and so-called un-nested-specific skills, the ones not tied to the hierarchy, may miss out on the chance to achieve as much career growth and rewards.

To business leaders, the implications are deep-rooted. Strategic talent development can no longer be an accidental stack of training units in limited skills. It requires a keen sense of this nested architecture. Companies should deliberately invest in general skills-building to form the basis of specializations of high value since they are silent multipliers. The failure to do so will not only lead to the suboptimal investment in the specific training, but also to the increased inequality in the workforce.

In fact, this study is a vivid example of how the lack of competence in general skills, i.e., language, may result in the so-called skill entrapment and permanent wage penalties among some demographic groups. It is a structural drawback evidenced across gender and racial/ethnic lines that offers a strong, evidence-based directive toward balanced, early-stage skill building.

Finally, human capital will not just be accumulating more skills in the future. It is all about making strategic sense of their dependencies, the long-term strength of underlying general abilities and making good use of the structure that underpins genuine expertise.

To the ambitious MBA, this represents a strategic requirement – a roadmap towards creating stronger, more flexible, and eventually, more valuable human capital.

–Read: Hosseinioun, M., Neffke, F., Zhang, L., & Youn, H. (2025). Skill dependencies uncover nested human capital. Nature Human Behaviour, 9(4), 673–687. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-02093-2