The three million dollar question: who owns your competence?

The three million dollar question: who owns your competence?

The question 'who owns your competence' is an important one with important consequences. When I asked many of my friends during the preparation works of this book, I got multiple conflicting answers. Take Lut for example who is a university professor. She answered her competence belongs partly to the university because they hold the intellectual rights to her work as signed in a labor contract. But also to herself and the teams (including students) she worked with over the years. In Singapore the best students are given grants to go study abroad at prestiges institutes, but they have to work a couple of years as government officials afterwards in return. So does the government own their competence because they invested in it, or the people themselves? What is your answer? Write it down below.

Who owns your competence? _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

I have struggled a long time with this question of ownership, partly because it has such important consequences. The prime consequence is that the owner is the one that has the responsibility and authority to select and invest in them. With ownership comes responsibility. So if we decide that you, the competent knowledge worker, owns your own competences it automatically means you are the one that should invest in them actively. That includes paying for your own competence development. It would mean that it is YOUR job to actively monitor the state and value of your competency mix and make sure you learn, do and share. If it is your employer that owns your competence at the other hand, it would become his responsibility to make sure you keep your competencies at level, and he should pay for the required courses, magazine subscriptions, etc. So who owns your competence?

In the end I came to the conclusion that competence has a shared ownership. It is shared amongst the three actors involved in building and using talents.

• Private : that means you
  
• Work : that means your firm
• Society : that means your government

Your competences can be claimed by yourself as an individual. They can also be claimed by your employer(s) and by your government to some extend. It doesn't mean that the three actors have equal shares. Depending on the time and place your live in, one of the three will have the dominant share and become the prime owner, and thus the prime responsible and investor. In a communist regime, everything is owned by 'the people', and thus your competences belong to society, represented by its government. That means in a communist regime, the government will decide upon the competences you will build, and how they will be used. In the capitalistic system, there is free choice of the individual to choose what competencies to develop, but by all kind of legal systems like patents and copyrights your employer will claim the intellectual rights of your work. In the fifties and later, the corporate world was stable and predictable, and changing firms via outside hiring was not a common practice. You would join a company 'for life' when you graduated, and the company would own your entire career and development path and pay for it. Refusal to take the next step on the corporate ladder would mean the end of your career. Your competence development was owned by the firm who paid for it, and you could not take it away and go elsewhere with it because the labor market did not work that way at the time. Nowadays, job hopping is a common phenomena and employers are investing less and less in workforce development because people will on average change jobs before that investment has paid back. The shelve life of a competence has also shortened significantly which means an employee will have a series of 'mini' careers of 3-5 years each during his professional life. The employee is now in the owner and driver seat of his competence.

You, your employer and your government can claim ownership of your competence based on the argument of 'investment'. Who invested, who put its money into developing the competences you have today? You have invested a lot of your time in it, invested in taking and paying for evening classes, extra degrees, etc. You may have invested by taking lower paid apprentice jobs in order to get the chance to build up experience. But your employer equally invested in you giving you the learning and development opportunities. In some countries employers are legally required to give each employee a minimum number of development days a year. And your government laid the foundation of your competence from the days of your childhood through university, and later on via special programs to 'upskill' you and get you off the unemployment statistics. On the basis of the investment argument, they all have valid claims.

It is a common practice that investors claim ownership of (part of) the value of whatever they invested in. Shareholders regard themselves as the owners of the firm for crying out loud. (Side note: Even with my economic glasses on, I think that is rubbish. Shareholders own just that: shares. Those are in the best case pieces of papers that state you have invested in a firm and are in return entitled to equal and correct information on that firm in order for you to judge on your investment. That's the deal, no more no less. You are an investor, not an owner.)

But it is not sufficient to invest in something to become the owner. There are legal ways to protect an investment in capital or goods or ideas in the form of patents, copyright, etc. The legal deal is that in return for your innovation, you get a monopoly on it for a limited period in time. Copyrights for example are valid anywhere from 50-100 years after the author has died. Pharmaceutical companies have a monopoly on the medicines they invent for a number of years, after that they become public domain and anyone can produce them. The idea behind patents and other forms of intellectual capital is to ensure people are motivated to invent new things and advance society. If you would not be given the opportunity to profit from your own invention, why would you do it? So both the inventor and society gain by such a deal. Such protection does not exist for the competence locked in the head of people. There are laws that protect people from becoming the slave of a corporation or a government, no one owns you. That means that you can legally walk out of the door of your firm, taking away all the potential locked inside you in the form of competence. You walk out taking away the whole investment the firm has made in you, which makes the argument of investment a void one in the context of competence. That is, if you can walk away. Remember, in the fifties that was not a common thing. Today it is, so I would argue that because you as an individual knowledge worker can move around freely taking away your competence wherever your journey takes you, you are the prime owner in this time and age.

Key point: the ownership of your competence is shared amongst yourself, your employer and your government. But in this day and age, you have the biggest claims on your competence, and therefore become the prime responsible for selecting and investing in them.