about building competence - the 3 builders

The 3 builders

Tip number three is that you are not alone in the construction of your competence. There is you, there is work, and there is government.

Let's flash back to the ownership of competence earlier in this book in the chapter 'about competence'. We concluded that competence has a shared ownership, shared by three parties. There is the private shareholder -you-, the work shareholder - your employers-, and society. We also said that the times have made us, the 'homo competens', the prime owner and therefore prime responsible for selecting, building and maintaining our competences. We did not say that we were on our own. Employers and governments still have an interest in the use of our talent, and we can count on them to help us build it. Just remember it is you that steers and has overall accountability in the end.

These are the three parties around the competence table:

	Private	Work	Society
Who is this?	You. As an individual or as a family.	Your organization. That's above all your current employer, but also your past and future ones. It also includes the ones that do not pay you such as charity and other organisations.	The government. That's your country, your region, your city.
What do they want?	The pursuit of happiness.	Profit / Service.	Prosperity here.
The name of the competence game?	Personal development.	Talent management.	Opportunity.
How do they help build talent?	Employ-ability. Select. Build. Prove.	Available talent. Training. Practice.	Life long learning. Education.

Society: opportunity

The name of the competence game for governments is opportunity. In most parts of the world that is defined as 'equal opportunity'. The government is interested in maximizing the prosperity that comes out of a talented population. The best way to do that is not to let talent go to waste. If a child does not get equal access to good education and equal access to the job market later on, its talent gets wasted or under utilized. That causes less income for the government through income tax, maybe even more costs because of unemployment, unhappy people and voters, hampered creativity and less prosperity for society overall. It is in the best interest of the government to nurture a society where the combined talents of all people lead to maximum prosperity.

One way government benefits from competence is through its income tax. In my part of the world 50% of the value I generate privately or as part of my company, gets taxed away by the government. I'm the first to admit I live in a part of the world with high tax burden, but the principle holds allover this planet. It's not just good for the treasury, society benefits from attracting talent pools. Concentrating particular sectors and talents on your territory will boost creativity and innovation and lift prosperity for all. All governments are seeking to get the new Silicon Valleys of this world their way. In a talent economy, it helps a lot if you attract and host that talent on your soil. Especially when the worlds gets flat and global and people can and indeed do go work anywhere and where companies outsource activities elsewhere. (Tip for governments: in a talent economy the location companies choose has less to do with raw materials or closeness to market, and more with responsive governments and available talent.) And of course society equally needs talents to meet the challenges it is facing. It needs to cure its diseases, address difficulties, save the environment, have quality leadership, sustain and protect itself, etc. All those pickles needs competent people in the army, in politics, in public administration, in hospitals, in research centers and many more places that serve the public good.

Let's take a look at my situation. I'm influenced by the local government of my town (next to Leuven), by the government of my region Flanders, by the federal Belgian government and the European institutions above that. I'm leaving the UN out now. In Europe as a whole, we are facing a serious talent shortage on multiple domains because of demographic change. With an elderly population that massively (and early) retires, new replacement talent is needed and will be harder to find. That gives even more reason than before to Western societies to not let any talent go to waste. And I indeed see a lot of legislative efforts to make education and the work floor as inclusive as possible, and to ensure that talent wins over non-important criteria such as handicap, gender, religion, skin, etc.

Europe and Flanders also put in place a lot of initiatives to foster innovation and tie new promising industries and associated talent here so future prosperity can be preserved. The Lisbon Agenda is a good example of that. The two regions of Belgium each launched a program to focus on the sectors and talents they want to become leaders in, all in order to preserve our current prosperity and standard of living. Wallonia launched its 'Marshall plan' and selected 5 competence pools (pharmacy/health, agro-food, mechanical engineering, transport/logistics and aeronautics/aerospace). Flanders has the VIA (Flanders in action) plan drafted in consultation with the middle field and selected 6 breakthrough areas to become a top 5 region by 2020 (green cities, smart logistics, responsive government, medical center, learning, entrepreneurship ).

Question: Do you have any idea what your governments want to be good at?

Your answer: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

You can count on your government to give you a good basic education. And modern societies will not stop there and make work of life long learning and adult education as well. Government is there to get you up to level to perform in a domain, and is there to help you reorient your career and re-skill when your old skills become less valuable.

Back in Flanders, the VDAB (who takes care of the unemployed) has widened its mission. It not only considers the work seeking as its customers, but all 6 million inhabitants. During their careers the VDAB wants to be there at crucial moments: before you find your first job, and in between jobs when you need to reorient.

Governments want to maximize the prosperity they can get out of their talented population.

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Work: talent management

The name of the competence game for organizations is talent management. Talent management is often defined by the activities the 'people department' or HR does: recruiting and retaining, compensation and rewards, performance evaluation and management, succession planning, training and development, etc. That is all very true. But let me put my economic glasses back on : in essence, talent management is the exercise of matching the demand for talent with the supply for it. The demand is the talent the organisation needs to run its projects, to keep its promise to its customers, to produce or perform whatever it is the company does. The supply is the talent it grows internally or hires on the labor market.

Talent management in organisations is a make or buy decision. It has swung a few times back and forth between making it in-house via corporate universities, internships, management rotation programs etc and buying it on the market, luring people with extravagant salary packages. In my short 12-year career in the ICT industry so far, I've seen two swings going up and down already. When I started, companies would throw company cars at university graduates. Just after the year 2000, the dot.com bubble called for hiring freezes. Then it ticked up again. Then the financial world collapsed at the end of 2008. But with events going so fast and unpredictable, can a company really just switch from one leg to the other? The choice of make-or-buy a talented workforce is a false choice. It is not 'or', but 'and'. Depending on the context, there is a level of talent to create in-house, and a level to hire in. It's make-and-buy.

Organizations need competent employees or contractors to do the activities that generate the profit or service. As we discussed before, any prediction of what activities you will be doing in the future, let alone the talent you'll need for it have a big risk factor. That is why your employer no longer provides life long careers or substantial internal education possibilities. Especially for competences that you can walk away with and sell freely on a global market, you are increasingly considered the prime investor. Your employer will build or improve your skills when they are needed and valuable immediately, and when they are specific for its business. So count on the company to provide product training for example. But general skills such as management, selling, negotiating are less likely to be fully funded by your current employer, as the risk is very high he will not be the one benefiting from it. In a time of talent shortage, salaries increase up to a level where it becomes unwise for companies to equally train their workforce, unless that is part of the salary package in the first place. Companies that send their top talent to an MBA education very well face loosing them a month after graduation because competition buys them away or because the new MBA graduates get impatient if you cannot immediately promote them to a new level. Already today you can see that companies that offer MBA programs either let you sign agreements that you'll stay employed for x years, have you partly fund out of your own pocket, or have you invest your personal time in the program via evening and weekend classes. That trend is likely to increase.

Question: What development opportunities does your current employer offer?

Your answer: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

I'm in the learning field, I told you before. On one of my business trips abroad, I visited a client who wanted to rationalize its learning portfolio and internal learning development department. He was complaining that there was no business validation in what people could follow courses for, as long as the first line manager approved and paid for it. I never forget how he jokingly said 'They can take courses in underwater knife fighting if the manager approves it'. Unless you are in the pearl diving business, there is just no way that a course in underwater knife fighting can contribute to your performance. It cannot help build any competence the company needs you to perform well at. There is no business case for it. I kept quiet, but at that meeting I very much liked to shout out "That is not learning!". Corporate learning is education that contributes to business. My sister in law works at a local warehouse chain. As an employee benefit, she can enroll for free in trainings on Yoga and other oriental approaches to life. It's organized in the weekend but she can take a partner that pays only half the price with her. That equally makes me want to shout out: "It's not learning!". I know why companies do that, they do that to keep their people happy and motivated so they'll stay at the company. But that is not learning. That's another part of the HR duties: that is compensation and reward. It should come of the salary budget, not the education budget. (I have a hard enough time in my profession calculating the impact and return on investment on real learning programs, let alone I would need to keep underwater knife fighting courses on my budget.) But when I take a more high level view than my own little concerns in my own little field, it does make sense. Companies train people for two reasons: for learning (and better performance) and for reward (and retaining people). In short, the goal of talent management is to ensure available talent.

Employers help build your competence for two reasons: so that you generate more value through your performance, and so you stay with them. You can count on your series of employers to develop the competences they can immediately benefit from, and to co-fund those that have more value for you as an individual. And depending on your salary negotiation, market conditions and vision of your employer, they might build your competences in order to retain you.

Private: personal development

The name of the competence game on a private level is personal development. What you want out of life is the pursuit of your happiness, in whatever way, shape or form you define that. Obviously you want to grow competence in that domain. If you want to express yourself artistically, you can take an interest in photography, sculpting, flower arranging or else. And you will find the time, the passion, the learning and all you need for that personal development. If you want to understand your family roots, you can become a family tree researcher. If you find parenting the most important thing in the world, you might advise others parents on raising children. Likely, you will also want to contribute to society because people are social beings and love it or like it, but our personal pursuit of happiness includes belonging to a group and therefore contributing to that group. Also we earn our income by lending our talent to organizations that transform it into profit or service. For all those reasons, we want to be good at selected competence domains. Our competence contributes to our happiness and our income.

The private level holds the main cards for claiming the value of its talents. And because of a fast, blurry, spiky, flat and small world the others two players can or want to be involved less than before in selecting, building and maintaining our competence. We are in the driver's seat.

Between the three parties around the table, we HoCos are the managers of our competence. We build our own talent by carefully selecting what to become or stay good at, by investing time and money in building them, and by keeping proof.

A key word for us is 'employ-ability'. It means it's our job to keep meeting the requirements for employment, and not the job of government or employer. We need to do what it takes so employers still need our talents.

Question: Mr or Mrs Reader, what are you personally doing to keep up with your domain of expertise?

Your answer: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Bare in mind that a lot of what is written on employ-ability and life long learning focuses too much on the supply side of competent people. It is like governments assume that if they can educate enough people, they all will find work. That has never been true, and it won't be true in the network age either. Selection of what you want to be good at and when is a crucial activity on our personal task list. Supply and demand, remember! And 'value is what a damn fool will pay for it'. Also know what you can expect from the other two parties, and thus know what you need to take care of yourself. As a baseline, you can count on government to provide a lot of education. You can count on your employer to give you the context to gain experience. I hope it is in your nature to do a lot of sharing.

Key point: Tip number three is we are not alone. There are three builders of our competence: us, our work and our government. HoCos in the network age are the prime responsible for building their own talent, but get aid from government and employers.