WBTO, LLC
How WBTO builds a Skills, Knowledge and Ability Profile
The method, the reasoning behind it, and the record of what was tried and abandoned.
Generated %-d %B %Y from the live data. Re-run
build_methodology_page.py after any change.A SKAP is a short list of what a person needs to be able to do in one entry-level manufacturing job, written so an instructor or a shop supervisor can read it, with the equipment named beside each skill. It is the instrument a Regional Needs Assessment measures with. This page exists because the reasoning matters as much as the result, and because more profiles and more regions are coming.
Contents
Where things standWhat a SKAP containsThe seven-step processWhat "entry level" meansHow a profile gets validatedThe three artifactsThe source libraryCross-cutting analysisChange registerWhat we tried that did not workSources checked and rejected
Where things stand
Profiles
16
Skills
417
Source documents held
5,180
Canonical skills
35
Job titles mapped
114
| Profile | Job title employers post | SOC | Skills | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| machining | CNC Machinist | 51-4041 | 25 | draft |
| material_handling | Material Handler | 53-7062, 53-7065 | 25 | draft |
| molding_casting | Machine Operator - Die Cast | 51-4072 | 25 | draft |
| production_assembly | Senior Assembler | 51-2092, 51-9198, 51-2098 | 25 | draft |
| production_beverage | Brewer | 51-9012, 51-9111, 51-3092 | 25 | draft |
| production_chemical | Packaging Operator | 51-9011, 51-9111, 51-9023, 51-8091 | 25 | draft |
| production_food | Packaging Operator | 51-9111, 51-3092, 51-3093, 51-3099 | 29 | draft |
| production_furniture | Woodworker | 51-7011, 51-7042, 51-7021 | 25 | draft |
| production_machinery | Press Brake Operator | 51-4081, 51-4031, 51-2031 | 25 | draft |
| production_plywood | 51-7042 | 25 | draft | |
| production_printing | 51-5112, 51-5113 | 25 | draft | |
| production_sawmill | Saw Operator | 51-7041 | 24 | draft |
| production_textile_apparel | Industrial Sewing Machine Operator | 51-6031, 51-6062, 51-6063, 51-6064, 51-6042 | 25 | draft |
| production_transportation | Press Brake Operator | 51-2041, 51-2011, 51-2031, 51-4031 | 25 | draft |
| quality_inspection | Quality Inspector | 51-9061 | 40 | draft |
| welding | Welder and Fabricator | 51-4121 | 24 | draft |
Every profile is draft by design. See How a profile gets validated.
What a SKAP contains
One file per job. Every skill carries the same nine fields, and the format is frozen — welding.json is the reference.
| Field | What it is, and why |
|---|---|
| name | One to three words, so it reads in a table column. "SMAW", "Layout", "Cutting: Flame". Not a sentence. |
| description | One plain sentence saying what the person actually does. Written for a shop supervisor, not a standards committee. |
| entryLevel | 1-3, what a new hire should arrive with. Almost everything is 2. |
| equipment | The real hardware, named down to the consumable. This is what lets a school price a program, and it is the field that makes the instructor form work. |
| oesTags | Oregon Employability Skills. Kept in the data, no longer printed — see CC-11. |
| source | Which documents the skill traces to, and whether we hold them. A citation to a document nobody has looks authoritative and is not. |
| canonicalSkill | One of 35 common names, added 2026-08-04. Makes cross-profile analysis possible without touching the trade-specific wording. |
| canonicalEquipment | Tags from a 92-item vocabulary, same purpose. |
| onetRefs | The SOC code, which is what joins a profile to labour-market data. |
The seven-step process
These steps are read at build time from Part One of the SKAP Development Standard, the document of record, so this page cannot say something different. The rule that governs additions to the process: does it help produce another profile, or does it help describe the process of producing one? Only the first kind gets adopted.
- Pick the job. We profile the jobs that employ the most people in the region, plus the skilled trades that feed them. Each one is anchored to an O*NET occupation code.
- Gather the source documents. Apprenticeship standards, industry credentials (NIMS, AWS, ASQ, MSSC and the like) and program accreditation standards for that job. We use every document we can get, not just one, and we record which ones we hold.
- Write the skill list from those documents. Twenty to twenty-five skills, in the words the trade uses, each one citing the documents that name it. O*NET tells us which jobs matter; it does not write the skill list, because its statements are too general to name a machine.
- Propose a starting level for each skill, 0 to 3, clearly labeled as a proposal. Software may propose it; a machine-proposed number is always labeled as such.
- Ask the people who know. Employers and instructors rate every skill on the same form: what level does a new hire need to arrive with?
- The answer is the average. Once at least five employers have rated a job, the published level for each skill is the average of their answers, shown with how many answered and how spread out they were. Under five employers, the profile stays labeled draft.
- Re-ask every year and update. Each engagement pins the O*NET version it started with so results stay comparable.
What "entry level" means
Somebody with no work experience in that job. They may have some technical training from a program, they may not. Really it is the job an employer will fill with someone who has never done the work before.
We define the job, not the person, because that is what you can see standing on a shop floor: tasks are routine and predictable, the worker follows a setup someone else prepared, and somebody else checks the work before the part moves on. It is also how the American Welding Society defines an entry welder in QC10:2017 and how NIMS defines Machining Level I — two trades, two organisations, same answer, arrived at independently.
Established by a six-stream review of 76 published definitions on 2 August 2026. Full statement: WBTO_Entry_Level_Definition.md.
The distinction people get wrong. Oregon publishes two education bars for the same occupation. Typical entry-level education is what gets a résumé looked at. Competitive education is what you need to beat people already in the job. Our profiles are written to the entry bar. A high-school program measured against the competitive bar looks like a failure by construction.
How a profile gets validated
The fieldwork is the validation. There is no separate practitioner review before a profile goes out. Employer and instructor returns vet it, helped by an explicit are there any skills missing? question on both forms.
Decided 2 August 2026. The reasoning: a validation gate nobody has capacity to run is worth less than a lighter check that actually happens. The earlier method required two SME raters per profile and fifty pooled judgments through two Cohen's kappa gates. It never ran once.
The risk, stated. If a statement is wrong you get precise answers to a wrong question, and employers rarely write much in a free-text box. Accepted: a wrong line costs one cycle, not a project. The consequence is that plain language is now load-bearing — nobody smooths the wording before an employer sees it.
The three artifacts
One source file, three renderings, each written for its own reader. A statement worded to be rated is not worded to be read, and neither is worded to price equipment. Trying to make one artifact do all three is what made the earlier process unusable.
| Artifact | Reader | What it asks |
|---|---|---|
| SKAP document | instructor, supervisor, client | Nothing. It is the reference: skills, plain descriptions, equipment, how it was built, and known gaps. |
| Employer form | employer | Level needed 0-3 per skill, plus we would train it. Then top three employability skills most important and top three hardest to find. Then what do you call this job, and what is missing. |
| Instructor form | program instructor | Three per skill: A completer level, B instructor's own level, C do you have what you need to teach it. Plus the printed equipment list to cross out, and the ten employability skills as taught and assessed / happens but not assessed / not addressed. |
Why the instructor form has three columns. They turn a gap into a diagnosis. Instructor below the bar is a professional development need — a program cannot teach past its instructor. Instructor capable but equipment missing is an equipment need, with a price. Both fine and students still short is a curriculum or time need, which was invisible before and would have been misread as an equipment problem, buying a machine that was already in the room. Where the first two coincide, professional development comes first: equipment bought for an instructor who cannot run it sits idle.
The source library
Profiles are built from published training standards. The library is the corpus. It lives at D:\WBTO_Library; the metadata lives in git.
tga
1,825
nzqa_units
1,476
ras_national
1,108
oregon_boli
299
nocti
262
open_standards
143
esco
60
Three states, and the distinction is the point. catalogued means we know it exists and how to get it. held means the file is on disk with a hash. read means content has been extracted into a profile. Only a held document is a source.
Why that distinction exists. The machining profile was built from one of the four Oregon machinist standards, and the one it used was Boeing's aerospace standard. Compared against the hand-curated practitioner version it set the bar a mean of +0.27 too high. That was not a modelling error. It was source selection, invisible because nothing recorded what else was available. A later audit found three of the six documents the welding and machining profiles cite were not on disk at all.
Cross-cutting analysis
Added 4 August 2026. The 197 skills fielded at that date carry a canonicalSkill label from a 35-name vocabulary and canonicalEquipment tags from a 92-item one. The 220 skills added since, in the subsector profiles and subsector modules of August 2026, are not yet labelled; they appear in their own profiles but not in the cross-cutting table below. Additive only — the trade-specific name, description, equipment text and level are untouched and remain the authority for anything costed or fielded.
Before this, 197 skills carried 180 distinct names and only 13 repeated across profiles, so "which skills cut across the region" was unanswerable. Safety alone appeared as Safety, Mill Safety, Safety & PPE, Shop Safety & PPE, Machine Guarding and Lockout/Tagout.
Skills that cut across the most pathways
| Canonical skill | Pathways |
|---|---|
| Safety & PPE | 8 of 16 |
| In-Process Inspection & Defect Recognition | 8 of 16 |
| Applied Shop Math | 6 of 16 |
| Measurement & Gauging | 6 of 16 |
| Materials, Metallurgy & Heat Treatment | 6 of 16 |
| Manual Material Movement & Ergonomics | 5 of 16 |
| Production Documentation & Records | 5 of 16 |
| Blueprint Reading, CAD & CAM | 4 of 16 |
| Equipment Care, PM & Housekeeping | 4 of 16 |
| Shift Handoff & Team Communication | 4 of 16 |
| Changeover & Tooling Change | 4 of 16 |
The shared foundations lab
Equipment appearing in six or more of the pathways. Not an opinion about what an introductory program should have — the empirical intersection of what every trade in the county needs.
| Item | Pathways | Rough cost |
|---|---|---|
| Hearing protection | 8 of 16 | under $100 |
| Calculator & tally counter | 8 of 16 | under $100 |
| Safety-toe & slip-resistant footwear | 7 of 16 | $100-1k |
| Safety glasses & face shield | 7 of 16 | under $100 |
| Emergency response station (fire extinguishers & first aid) | 7 of 16 | under $100 |
| SDS library, spill kit & absorbents | 7 of 16 | under $100 |
| Dust, fume & debris control (collection system, spark detection, deluge, shop vacuum, floor scrubber) | 7 of 16 | $10k-100k |
| Tape measure, steel rule & drafting scale | 7 of 16 | under $100 |
| Lockout/tagout kit & station | 6 of 16 | $100-1k |
| Caliper (vernier, dial & digital) | 6 of 16 | under $100 |
| Lubrication & coolant supplies (grease guns, oilers, cutting fluid, coolant filtration) | 6 of 16 | $1k-10k |
| WMS / ERP / MES / CMMS shop-floor terminal | 6 of 16 | $10k-100k |
| Machine guarding, interlocks, light curtains & E-stops | 6 of 16 | $1k-10k |
Equipment appearing in only one pathway is that pathway's specialisation. Together the two lists are a capital plan: the shared lab, then what each pathway adds.
Change register
Every methodology change, with the reasoning. Reviewed at each engagement kickoff and every September. Full text: WBTO_Methodology_Change_Register.md.
| # | Change | Status |
|---|---|---|
| CC-01 | Frame the rating scale around training ownership | Rejected for the scale · Partially adopted as wording |
| CC-02 | Exclude non-applicable responses from the demand denominator | Partially adopted · the excluded-denominator figure is reported, but does not |
| CC-03 | An employer internal-training-capacity product | Deferred — good idea, different product |
| CC-04 | Test Ohio's "80% is shared" claim against WBTO's own data | Under consideration |
| CC-05 | Facilitated task analysis (DACUM) for roles with no published source | Under consideration |
| CC-06 | Publish the modeled role counts, or keep suppressing them | Under consideration |
| CC-07 | Replace MSSC with a held document at tier 4, or request MSSC | Partially adopted 2026-08-02 (Wisconsin substituted) · the request is still open |
| CC-08 | Tier 6 requires a sponsor, so most apprenticeship standards are tier 5 | Adopted 2026-08-02 |
| CC-09 | One rating box, not two: 0 IS not-applicable | Adopted 2026-08-04 |
| CC-10 | Derive OES tags from O*NET Work Styles instead of deciding them | Adopted 2026-08-04 as the method · the concordance is PROPOSED, needs a |
| CC-11 | OES moves off the profile and onto the forms, as a measurement | Adopted 2026-08-04 |
| CC-12 | One box per column, and "we would train it" becomes a tick | Adopted 2026-08-04 |
| CC-13 | Column C turns a gap into a diagnosis | Adopted 2026-08-04 |
| CC-14 | Print the equipment list and let them cross out what is missing | Adopted 2026-08-04 |
| CC-15 | Retire the kappa validation gate; validate by the five-employer average | Adopted in v2.8, 2026-08-19 |
| CC-16 | One level vocabulary on every instrument: None / Awareness / Competent / Proficient, plus the plain sentence | Adopted 2026-08-19 |
| CC-17 | Instructor instrument fielded on the web; brand restyle; region-neutral landing page | Adopted 2026-08-19 (wording and delivery only; no rule change) |
| CC-18 | Site restructure: audience pages, NAICS-grouped jobs, subsector captured on employer responses | Adopted 2026-08-19 |
| CC-19 | Research-consent and sampling-frame fields on the web instruments | Adopted 2026-08-20 (Chris, same day): consent wording as drafted, identical on both |
| CC-20 | Credential and proficiency questions from the HECC consortium conversation (Diane Vidmantas) | Adopted 2026-08-21 for the employer web form (instrument 2026.08.4); instructor items |
| CC-21 | Subsector credibility review applied: visibility tags, card pulls, wave-zero modules | Adopted 2026-08-21 (instrument 2026.08.5). Chris approved the merged review packet |
| CC-22 | Sector-neutral rewording, one behavioural split, and eight new subsector profiles | Adopted 2026-08-22 (instrument 2026.08.6). Chris reviewed the rendered profiles |
What we tried that did not work
Kept so it is not re-proposed. Each carries the condition that would bring it back.
| Tried | Why it failed | Revisit when |
|---|---|---|
| Two Cohen's kappa validation gates | Needed two SME raters per profile and 50 pooled judgments. Never ran once in the life of the standard. | a client requires a published inter-rater statistic |
| Six-tier profile sectioning | The standard itself conceded all effort goes to tiers 5-6, so six tiers was ceremony over a two-tier reality. Nobody outside the HECC conversation read it. | HECC or a funder asks for tier-structured profiles |
| Asking instructors "do students get the opportunity to practice this?" | Opportunity is nearly free. Every program has students working in groups, so Collaboration is yes; every program has students who fail and retry, so Resilience is yes. Ten yeses, no signal. | never - replaced by taught-and-assessed, which discriminates |
| A 0-3 scale plus a separate N/A box | 0 already meant "not part of this job". The form asked the same question twice and gave two ways to answer it. | never |
| Four tick-boxes per rating | Unclear whether to mark one or several, and it does not survive the move to electronic forms. | never |
| Free-text "would you train it?" at the foot of the employer form | Asked for a paragraph about an unspecified number of skills. Would have come back blank. | never - it is a per-skill tick now |
| Filtering documents at harvest time | A keyword filter kept 26 of 261 NOCTI blueprints and would have dropped 235 permanently. A wrong tag costs disk; a wrong filter costs a source you never learn you were missing. | never - download everything, tag relevance |
| Assigning OES tags by hand | There was no method, and the generator prompt carried the WRONG ten, which is why Collaboration, Empathy and Social Diversity appear on zero of the 24 welding skills. The generator could not emit the words. | superseded by the O*NET Work Styles derivation |
| Publishing OES tags on the profile | Our tagging asserts 9-10 employability skills per profile where O*NET's incumbent data supports 3-4. Publishing a claim federal data contradicts invites a challenge we would lose. | if employer returns support the richer tagging |
| Growing the standards library further | 1,703 documents held; a profile reads three to five. Marginal value of document six onward is near zero. | a role with no usable source becomes a project requirement |
Sources checked and rejected
203 sources were evaluated and deliberately not used, each with a recorded reason, and 97 exist but could not be obtained. This log is the point: it stops the same dead end being walked twice.
| Source | Why not used |
|---|---|
| Composite Panel Association (CPA) | Certification is of PRODUCTS and PLANTS, not people - the ECC program certifies composite panel manufacturing facilities and the PMP Grademark program certifies physical and mechanical properties of wood panels |
| Wood Products Manufacturers Association (WPMA) | Offers FSC certification support, sustainability standards, networking events and business resources. No training standard, no skill standard, no certification of workers. Checked specifically because wood prod |
| APA - The Engineered Wood Association | Publishes product performance standards and runs mill quality auditing. Its people-facing content is quality auditor oriented, not production-operator training. Product standard, not skill standard. |
| American Home Furnishings Alliance (AHFA) | Funds third-party training rather than publishing a standard - approximately $15,000/year into the Alexander Furniture Academy at Catawba Valley Community College. The machine-level upholstery content (computer |
| Metals Service Center Institute (MSCI) | Explicitly positions itself as a resource for leadership education and executive training. Members perform cut-to-length and slitting, but MSCI publishes no operator training for those lines. Executive/manageme |
| Steel Tank Institute / Steel Plate Fabricators Associa | Training is INSPECTOR-level, not operator - SP001 Aboveground Tank System Inspector and Cathodic Protection Tester. The SPFA Pipe Quality Certification certifies fabricator SHOPS on QA/QC, lining and coating, a |
| Global Cold Chain Alliance (GCCA) | The Cold Chain Institute is a three-days-a-year, three-year management curriculum (cold chain management, customer service, food safety, warehouse operations, transportation operations) aimed at professionals, |
| INDA, the Association for Nonwoven Fabrics Industry | Short courses (1.5 to 3.5 days) on Elementary Nonwovens, Spunbond Technology and Meltblown Technology are technologist and product-development level - raw material selection, basic science, testing and characte |
| American Society for Quality (ASQ) | On the Manufacturing Institute roster but out of scope by WBTO's own rule: generic quality content. Certified Quality Inspector and similar credentials are method-and-statistics based and equipment-agnostic; th |
| ASCM (Association for Supply Chain Management, formerl | On the Manufacturing Institute roster. Planning, inventory and supply chain credentials (CPIM, CSCP) - planner and analyst roles, not production or material-moving operators. No machines named. |
| Lean Certification Partners (SME / AME / Shingo / ASQ) | On the Manufacturing Institute roster. Continuous-improvement methodology, deliberately process-and-equipment agnostic so it transfers across industries. Exactly the 'generic workplace readiness' category the b |
| Manufacturing Skills Institute (MSI) | On the Manufacturing Institute roster. Manufacturing Technician 1 (MT1) is a foundational, cross-industry assessment covering general manufacturing awareness, comparable in grain to MSSC CPT which the library a |
| NCCER | On the Manufacturing Institute roster, but its curricula are predominantly construction craft. Its industrial titles (millwright, industrial maintenance, boilermaking) target plant construction and maintenance |
| ACT (WorkKeys / NCRC) | On the Manufacturing Institute roster but already in the library via Oregon NCRC/WorkKeys. Foundational academic skills (applied math, graphic literacy, workplace documents) - by design not occupation-specific |
| International Society of Automation (ISA) | On the Manufacturing Institute roster. Certified Control Systems Technician is instrumentation and control systems, oriented to process-plant I&C technicians and calibration rather than 51-xxxx production opera |
| American Welding Society (AWS) | CMA member, already in the library (QC10:2017 / SENSE). No newer edition or deeper operator-level document surfaced during this pass. |
| American Foundry Society (AFS) | CMA member and METAL partner, already in the library (AFS Institute). Noted that AFS courses such as Steel Melting 201 exist and are complementary to the SFSA Artisan Program, but AFS itself is not a new find. |
| Metal Treating Institute | CMA member, already in the library. |
Showing 18 of 203. Full log: library/rejected.json and library/could_not_reach.json.
This page and the skills profiles it describes incorporate information from O*NET Web Services and the O*NET database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA). Used under the CC BY 4.0 license. O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA. WBTO, LLC has modified some of this information; USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed, or tested these modifications.