Chapter 4: Onboarding and Certification
The role is defined, the candidate is chosen. Next comes onboarding. How does an agent acquire the specific capabilities the job requires?
Through skills. But a skill is easily mistaken for "just another tool," and this chapter pulls it out of the tool pile. A skill is a unit of capability with two faces. Facing inward, it is onboarding training — it makes an agent competent at a specific job. Facing outward, it is a professional certification — reusable and verifiable across agents, environments, and roles. For a skill to be worth keeping, it cannot be a script that happens to run. It must be reproducible.
Chapter 1 said a skill is like a line on a resume. This chapter turns that into a formal definition.