Value is what a damn fool will pay for it
What is the value of your basket of competences? I've warned you before that I look at the world through economic glasses, so I hope you won't oppose my notion of value as something you can express as a monetary value. I don't believe in hippie terms as intrinsic human value that cannot be measured, at least not in this context. Competences have a value that can be expressed as a euro, dollar, yen or any other currency number.
So what's it worth?
I had a professor at university, Marcel VA. I believe he was teaching the course on cost accounting. It's not important because I don't remember anything from that course other than the credo he kept on repeating, and became his trademark. He is retired now but I do believe that when one of his many generations of students meets him at the supermarket, they would chant the credo. I would. The credo goes like this:
Value is .... what a damn fool will pay for it.
There. The value of something, anything, is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. That's it. No deep intrinsic concepts of happiness or intangible benefits. If someone wants to pay 1.000.000 euro for your house, that is what it is worth. If no one is willing to pay 100.000 euro for a good secondary school education, it means it is not worth that much. Simple and clear. Value is what a damn fool will pay for it.
What I didn't say is that the one benefiting from the value is the one that needs to pay for it. Some business models in the web 2.0 area provide free services to their end users, but it's someone else who's paying the bill through advertising. It's how TV channels operate too. In the example of secondary school, a lot of people might not value it that high, but that's simply because the government does and pays for it anyway, so you as an individual don't have to. So either yourself, someone on your behalf or the government needs to be the fool willing to pay. Without that, there is no value.
That very simple credo goes for competences too. The value of your competences at any point in time, is whatever a damn fool will pay for it. In most cases we have a market mechanism to determine prices at any point in time. The supply and demand for competencies in a certain domain will mark the spot of it's value. The point is that like levels of competencies, also the value of competencies fluctuate over time. And they fluctuate by the degree that there are people or companies willing to pay a certain sum for them.
Around the year 2000, a lot of IT skills were in high demand and even young graduates got company cars, exuberant salaries and attractive working conditions because their competencies were so 'hot' and limited in supply. After the bubble, the situation changed over night for some of those skills. Don't expect competencies to have the same value at any given point in time. We live in way to unpredictable times for that. The value of your competencies is whatever anyone will be willing to pay for them at a given moment in time. With that insight, it's up to you to make sure you have 'marketable' competencies at all time. You'll have to make the decisions to let competencies that go down in value wither, and invest in building those that look like they'll have a lot of value in the short term future. Not all your competencies need to be valuable, but you'll need enough of those to ensure yourself of an income. It also means that the likelihood that being good in just one domain will forever ensure you the income you need, is small to non existent. As it goes for financial markets investment advise: don't put all your eggs in one basket, but diversify your portfolio of competencies over a few domains.
Key point: the value of your competencies is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. And that fluctuates over time, driven by supply and demand.
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