about competences - is it like riding a bike?

Is it like riding a bike? No!

Life used to be simpler. You went to school, did the exams, got a paper and that paper was your ticket into your career. It said that you were competent for now and to eternity in something rather general and no one doubted it. That assumes that gathering competences is like riding a bike: once you can do it, you never forget. But is that still a valid assumption, if it ever was?

Stef Bos is someone you probably don't know. Unless you speak Dutch or Afrikaans you will never have heard one of his songs. In the classic one 'Is dit nu later?' ("Is this now later?") he sings:

Een diploma vol met leugens, waarop staat dat ik de waarheid ken. (A diploma full of lies that says I know the truth.)

Let's do a little trivia test to prove a point. Solve the question below:

How many planets are there in our solar system (including Earth) ? _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

When I learned this and other general knowledge in school, the answer was 9. There were nine planets. Fact of life. Guess what, a few years ago scientists agreed that Pluto lost its status of planet. I don't know why, too small, more like an ice clump, bad lobbying by the plutonists, ... But it is now known as a dwarf planet. I'm not even in the middle of my career and basic knowledge like that has changed. The diploma I got in geography is a lie. If you can't trust this basic knowledge to last you a lifetime, why would you trust your acquired competencies will stand the test of time? (BTW, if you got the right answer 8, I congratulate you. You're the dude! (or gall). )

Let do some straight talk here: building competences is NOT like riding a bike. It is NOT a one time certification that states you have proven for ever you are good and know the truth. Over your life and career competences go up and down. They evolve with time. They fade. And if you stop investing in your competences, the ever fast forwarding times we live in WILL make them obsolete in a couple of years. The shelve life of a competencies or diplomas for that matter used to be career long. Not anymore. My guess is that a competency will now last you about 5 years in your career. By then you need to re-skill yourself, get up to speed with the latest developments in your competency domain, or move to another one. Our careers have become a series of little careers that last 3-5 years. Taking myself as an example, I've staid with the same employer for all these years, but that's only because it is a big firm where I can shift career every 3 to 5 years. To me if feels like a natural rhythm: a year to get good, a year to perform well and a year or a couple of years to star.

It is true that there used to be a time where society, information and economy were much more stable and almost perfectly predictable. The 50ies for example. So it made much more sense then to treat competences as acquired for life. But the context has changed. As we'll cover in the chapter 'about the times we live in', the ride is much more bumpy now. We saw the highest and lowest oil price within a six month period. And things are volatile and fast. If people in America can't pay back their loans, the economy of Iceland falls apart the next month. Go figure. In such times, it makes no more sense to neglect the devaluation of competencies over time. In fact, shelve life of competencies might get shorter and shorter...

Coming back to the evidence we talked about earlier: that evidence of your competencies is also prone to devaluation with time. Education you took recently is a better evidence than a course covering the state of the art of last century. So when evaluating evidence of competence, time is a critical factor.

Key point: Competences have a limited shelve life. They fade.