A person’s primary skill is pursued to journeyman level or beyond, and the secondary to practitioner level, and the secondary should be chosen so that every vital primary skill has a second holder, not simply whatever the person likes best. Pair the holders of one skill so they do not share a household or a work hazard, since a single illness or accident then removes both.
Part of Cross-Training Program
How to pick each person’s second skill so that the community’s vital skills have real backup, and how deep that backup has to be.
The Secondary Skill Is A Coverage Problem
The carrier gives each person one primary skill, pursued to journeyman level or beyond, and one secondary skill in a different craft, pursued to practitioner level, which means competent independent work on standard tasks. Left to personal taste, the secondary skills will cluster around the pleasant crafts, and the vital but unpopular ones will have no backup. Treat the choice as a coverage problem: the community knows its vital skills (Essential Roles ranks which to train first), and the secondary skills should fill the gaps.
A Worked Example: Four People, Four Skills
Take a small group with four vital skills: smithing, medicine, water systems and the pressure vessel. Each person holds one as a primary. If each person’s secondary is the next person’s primary, in a cycle, every skill then has two holders:
| Person | Primary | Secondary |
|---|---|---|
| A | Smithing | Medicine |
| B | Medicine | Water systems |
| C | Water systems | Pressure vessel |
| D | Pressure vessel | Smithing |
Counting holders: smithing has A and D, medicine has B and A, water systems has C and B, pressure vessel has D and C. That is 2 holders for each of 4 skills, using 4 secondary skills for 4 people. With n people and n vital skills, a cycle gives n secondary assignments and 2 holders per skill. Real communities have more skills than people, so the vital ones get the secondary slots first and the rest are covered as time allows.
Keep The Two Holders Apart
Two holders of a skill give cover only if one of them is likely to be there when the other is not. The two should not:
- Share a household, since the same illness or the same fire affects both.
- Share a hazard, such as working side by side in the same dangerous workshop.
- Depend on one another’s presence, where each only works when the other is there.
The corpus’s Cross-Training article asks the backup to be someone who is interested in the skill and cognitively suited to its nature (manual, analytical or interpersonal). That is the fit test; the separation test is added here.
How Deep The Secondary Needs To Be
Practitioner level is the carrier’s target, and it is enough for standard tasks. The Cross-Training article’s minimum for a critical skill is a backup who can handle 70% of normal cases alone. The extra rule from Cross-Training Program applies here: for safety-critical steps of a hazardous task, a practitioner-level backup runs the task alone only after passing the same safety tests as the primary.
What You Need
- The skills inventory (Skill Assessment).
- The list of vital skills, ranked.
- Knowledge of households and workplaces, to check the separation.
- Time (see Rotation Schedules).
Method: Assigning Secondary Skills
Step 1: Count holders for each vital skill. Those with one holder come first.
Step 2: List candidates who show aptitude and interest.
Step 3: Check separation of household and hazard.
Step 4: Assign and announce. Make the assignment a recorded community responsibility, as the Apprenticeship Systems article does for apprenticeships.
Step 5: Plan the learning: shadowing, rotation stints and a final test.
Step 6: Review each year. People move, fall ill, change skills.
Common Mistakes
- Choosing secondaries by taste alone.
- Putting both holders of a skill in one household.
- Letting the secondary lapse. Without practice, practitioner level fades.
- Treating the secondary as a spare for the lowest-status job.
- Over-loading the few capable people with secondaries in every vital skill.
What’s Next
- Learn next: Rotation Schedules — how practice time is found
- Combine with: T-Shaped Skill Profiles — the shape of a person with a deep skill and a broad base