How to manage dynamic skills in the Future of Work
Competencies are key to meeting market demands and addressing the challenges of the future.
The impact of digital cloud technology, Ai and Machine Learning is already a reality and will be very important in determining how skills are created, defined, measured and managed by organisations.
Traditionally employers often use proxies to determine whether the skills are sufficient for a role (previous experience in the same role, in the same industry, with the same company size, having completed studies at certain universities, or coming from a certain type of consultancy firm etc).
In the happiest cases these proxies are combined with the evaluation of the results and the soft characteristics to fit in a certain organisational context.
While this method is certainly reasonable, it also has some counter-indications that could be overcome by a new digital organisational model of recruitment and management of competencies:
1) It is too static and formal . The big American tech companies themselves must periodically make exceptions to the recruitment rules and force the system (e.g. by selecting the genius who has not graduated, etc.).
2) It entails an excessive cost for companies, since for each role employers look for profiles in small labour markets (e.g. marketing directors in the cosmetics sector) where supply is scarce and therefore the price is raised.
3) It creates exclusion as it does’t allow people to be considered outside of these criteria, for a series of reasons NOT related to lack of competence, and end up fuelling network effects whereby people self-refer to each other in the same group.
4) It creates phenomena of group thinking and resistance to change, which are dangerous for innovation, since within these groups certain theses and experiences are absolutized and alternative paths are not tried out.
5) It creates disengagement as prevents people from changing and experimenting with new professional challenges.
However, all this is destined to change radically and in some ways some signs are already visible.
The digital world diminishes the importance of tacit knowledge/traditional experience and allows access to skills and data in a cheaper and more universal way.
The structure of organisational processes will allow multiple configurations and a number of interesting operational possibilities enabled by technology:
1) organisations without rigid job roles
2) collaborative work as a training ground for the creation and updating of skills
3) start-ups as recruitment channels
4) collaboration between different companies on specific projects
The dissemination of data will also allow an increasingly precise assessment of the skills required for the various activities.
The set of skills needed to perform an activity can thus be easily determined and updated. Where some skills are lacking, they can be obtained through training, lateral experience and teamwork.
The productivity, inclusiveness and agility of this new skills management model will soon be much greater than the current model, and the divide will grow between those who succeed in experimenting with new working models and those who remain trapped in conservative dynamics.
This change will be a great opportunity to make organisations more effective, the labour market fairer and professions more satisfying.
In a few years we will see the current organisational structure and related practices a bit like we see tribal practices today.
They are interesting and some people will continue to find them preferable, but they will always belong more to folklore than to modernity.
Nicolò Boggian
