The eWorld Radar

Are you worth it?

Do you know what you are worth? That is do you know what the market is willing to pay to secure your services?

And do you know what steps you might take to increase your worth?

Rather than consume brain power fretting about job security and scheming how to side step the boot, why not focus on enhancing your economic worth.

As long as your worth commands a return that meets your financial expectations and your worth is based on objective analysis, then you should have no trouble remaining employed.

If an honest appraisal of your worth suggests you are currently overpaid then be prepared to be 'right-paid' or to invest in your own development.

Deadwood has nowhere to float in the digital economy.

Ade McCormack

Self-reliant users

I am encountering many IT leaders who are concerned that they cannot reconcile the need to support every new user device that hits the market.

This most likely reflects the world they grew up in, whereby users were spoon-fed and developed the lazy habit of seeking help rather than opening the user manual or just having a play.

The merging Gen Y user is in a hurry to get things done. They know the questions they have re their email or device issue have been asked before and answered by many. So they simply surf the web, follow the advice and progress with their work without missing a beat.

They are not interested in dealing with knowledge politics and the surliness of tech staff sentenced to to the service desk for bad behaviour or social skills shock therapy.

By all means set up a forum to let users share their experiences, but in reality the service desk needs to move from supply management to high value  demand creation.

Ade McCormack

Beyond e-Skills

It is good to see that e-skills are being taken seriously on both sides of the IT function boundary.

However as the IT function transitions from delivery of IT projects ("over to you user") to provision of information services ("help me analyse the information the system produces") the skill-set of the technologist will need to change.

We are starting to hear about T-skills. The trunk of the 'T' representing the deep technical skills needed as an IT professional or high-tech user.

The horizontal line represents those broad skills needed for success in the innovation economy. Such skills include: 

• Communication (where IP stands for InterPersonal and not Internet Protocol).
• Commercial.
• Creativity.
• Service.
• Business.

I know there is little of these addressed by secondary or tertiary education in respect of a career in IT. The latter are at varying stages of reviewing their value proposition, so this is timely.

This T-model provides a heads-up for technologists who know they also have to raise their game to stay in play in a globalised, cloud-centric economy.

 

Beyond Job specifications

Did you find your current role through the traditional application process?

This order taking approach to acquiring employment is indicative that your employer has options in terms of swapping you out. That is the very nature of general job specifications. If you are smart, once in you will have redefined the role so that it is uniquely defined by your personal capabilities.

If you haven’t done this, then brace yourself to be replaced by a younger and cheaper model.

The emerging theme is that talent will move beyond passive trawling for job vacancies and take a more proactive approach to creating employment opportunities. Target employers may not have been planning on taking you on, but when faced with your potential value they find a way to get you on the team.

The Digital Hunter Gatherer

Gartner introduced us to the concept of digital natives and digital immigrants. The former were born into a web-centric world, the latter were not. This model helps us to understand how the needs / aspirations of the younger generation might differ from their parents.

But as we move deeper into the digital economy, simply being born tech-aware is not enough. This new economy requires self-sufficiency and a marketable set of skills to operate successfully in the volatile global economy. Branding skills are table stakes and that requires more than just keeping your Facebook account up to date.

So welcome the digital hunter gatherer. They have adapted to the digital landscape and have worked out how to both survive and thrive in the digital economy.

I’ll explore this new post-industrial worker in more detail in subsequent posts.

Ade McCormack

Time to be productive

Mankind from a consumer perspective has generally benefited from the Industrial era; more choice and lower prices.

But from a work perspective the benefits have been less obvious. Prior to the Industrial revolution (approximately a quarter of a million years) we were paid on what we produced, eg. caught rabbit, reared cow, built cart.

Then all of a sudden the model changed. A movement from the workshop / farm to the factory saw a transition in the way we were paid. Now we were selling our time rather than our productivity. So the skill of the typical worker became ‘how do I do as little as possible for a given unit of labour time?’.

This in turn created the management industry focused on how to counter this mindset.

The time-oriented approach still permeates both the traditional factory (conveyor belt) and modern factory (desk). Admittedly some roles are paid bonuses based on productivity, most notably sales, and so have a sense of ‘eat what you kill’.

Over time more and more of us are going to see a more direct correlation between our economic survival and our output. You are encouraged to embrace this model even if your employer doesn’t. Think of it as your insurance policy for the digital era.

Ade McCormack

Skills for the New Industrial Revolution

I recently facilitated a forum entitled the Skills for the New Industrial Revolution as part of the European Commission’s Mission Growth conference in Brussels. I was fortunate to have senior representatives from industry, government and academe along with a sample of Europe’s future workforce.

It is already apparent that the compassionate European skills agenda in place since the seventies, whereby the focus is on the disadvantaged rather than the ‘A team’ has not been successful. So whilst we must continue to focus on ensuring for example that our unemployed do not become unemployable, we must devote more attention to being world class if we want to remain part of the global value chain.

Whilst the aforementioned point focuses on the skill s of the individual, all such initiatives will come to nothing unless we have strong management in place. Management and equally importantly leadership skills acquisition must not be left to chance.  Allocating management roles to staff based solely on their experience is a recipe for disaster.

And neither of the aforementioned points will amount to anything if the skills policies are not in place at a national and trading block level. In fact the politicians must only be allowed to take up their positions if they have the skills needed to devise sensible policy.

Given that know the experiment to skill the nation from the ground up has failed, we can focus our attention on driving change from the top down.

Worker as athlete

The new normal dictates that we in the West will need to work harder to maintain our quality of life. Improving worker performance will be an ongoing exercise; much like athletes continually striving to improve their PB (Personal Best).

And what the workers will be judged on is changing as well. Intellectual capital and relationship capital will become increasingly important in the digital economy.

Thus the role of HR moves from ensuring people are sufficiently trained to be competent enough to fulfil their role to performance coaches focused on driving the work force to world class mastery.

Engagement will be a major theme. Keeping staff engaged won’t be the issue. Disengaged athletes will just be left behind and if they don’t step off the track they will get run down eventually. So that is self managing.

The challenge is how the HR function will improve its engagement with the workforce to create the intimacy needed for a coaching role and to have the influencing and technical skills to drive the ‘athletes’ towards mastery.

Sooner than you expect, you will be managing a stable of top flight athletes. All of whom are high maintenance. And given their new found discipline, when they come looking for tea and sympathy, biscuits will definitely not be an option.

Ade McCormack

The Inverse Peter Principle

You may be aware of the Peter Principle (more accurately a hypothesis) which suggests that people will continue to be promoted until they reach a position where they are in effect incompetent and thus do not rise further up the organisational hierarchy.

In the digital economy, this is unlikely to hold true because there will be no hierarchy. There will be experts and there will be those that align this expertise with what the market needs. The latter being an emerging 21^st century expertise domain.

This poses a problem if you are not an expert. In other words this is a problem for most of us.

Leaders who are used to setting the vision will be replaced by leaders who can infer the vision based on environmental factors including their access to expertise.

Managers who are paid to goad, charm and bully the workers into doing what is best for the company will no longer have a role where the workers are more motivated and passionate about what they do than any administrator.

Workers who operate in the traditional factory mode of doing the same stuff day in day out and whose thinking extends no further than lunch options will simply not be required. Unless they occupy niches in which there are no economies of scale on which to base the necessary investment in automation.

Thus career job number one is to reinvent ourselves as a genuine expert through acquiring the necessary skills and experiences. And to then alert the world to the new you. This may give rise to the digital economy Inverse Peter Principle, ie a race to genuine competence.

Ade McCormack

Industrial recruitment

It is a tenet of the industrial era that a focus on process and automation will improve output and maximise profits. The natural high cost of entry enabled the big to get bigger and dominate their markets as we have seen in mature sectors such as finance, retail and energy.

Recruitment is a little behind the curve as it is a very young industry. However the industry does have its giants and these are well represented on most high streets. What I find disturbing is their industrial approach to recruitment. Process seems to trump service.

The model may well work for McDonalds but not so for recruitment agencies. A transactional approach when dealing in a person’s career is insensitive at the very least.

My bigger concern is that these transaction-recruiters are seeping into the ‘less evolved’ agencies and thus blunting their service proposition.

Perhaps there is an element of natural selection taking place. Those recruitment companies that adopt transactional practices will gravitate to the high street where they will be eaten by the big boys. Those players that shun this approach and focus on a more personalised service will out manoeuvre the dinosaurs and thus enjoy higher margins.

So a low value approach will attract low grade candidates and low margins, which is okay if you can get the volume and stay in play despite the globalisation-induced margin tailspin. And similarly the personalised recruiters will attract the best candidates and the highest margins and will not be exposed
to commodity pressure.

Thus only one approach lends itself to the digital economy. For some its time to rethink recruitment.

Ade McCormack