Work Snippet - Build capabilities, not skills & knowledge

Build capabilities, not skills & knowledge

To help workers upskill and fulfil their career ambitions, more and more companies are setting up "learning & development" teams within their HR divisions. There is such a team in my current workplace, but I didn't find them very effective.

Make no mistake, they are very good people who probe you to reflect on your deeper desires & incentives, thereby helping you to find out what you exactly want (or are suited to) and then they would suggest courses or learn-from-the-job opportunities, or changes to work practices in order to start developing. But on the back of all these exercises, their minds revolves around two themes - what skills do you need to develop, and what knowledge you should acquire. And this is the problem - answering these questions will not get us to where we want to be career and life-wise.

We now live in an age in which skills training and knowledge acquisition are easy to access - you can search online, subscribe to specialist sites, or download specially designed & gamified apps. Merely learning new skills & knowledge is a hygiene factor, and won't get you anywhere in your next job interview.

If you have been an interviewer for your company, you will find that each person's CV is now clogged with skills and knowledge - the days when people learned nothing beyond what were prescribed in their university courses are gone. But at the same time, you also find that the people short-listed for the next round are usually not the candidate with the most skills & knowledge; it is instead the candidates whom you have interrogated and find that the team will be happy to work with, can handle the scenarios and challenges that will arise in the particular office/company, and can contribute towards a team or project's success by utilising their skills & knowledge and amalgamating them with those from the other team members.

As the knowledge economy move up a level through the introduction of web services, artificial intelligence and robotics, the processing-based jobs are replaced, like those general ledgers reconciling receipts, solicitors processing standard divorces or house purchases, and banking analysts processing mortgage applications. These jobs require professional skills & knowledge, and once you have successfully acquired them you know you can do the job after some company-specific adjustments. In work environments that filled with these jobs and management roles that organise & monitor these job roles, asking 'what skills and knowledge do you need' is the model question triggering the most succinct and useful answers.

As processing-based jobs are killed, a new type of jobs surface - "movie-making-type" jobs which does not have a set script of when to engage which skills & knowledge and how the skills & knowledges should be utilised. Instead, as a crew of workers is set upon a fluid project which need to adjust to ever-changing external situations and emerging understanding about the customers and the market, each person needs to identify their role within the team and the results they need to deliver within each phase, then pick or acquire skills & knowledge that would enable them to play the role and fulfil their portion of results. If the requisite skills & knowledge are not ready, then go and get them through those convenient channels.

What this means is that skills & knowledge per se are not the primary distinguishers to set the top candidate from the bulk. What it calls for is the candidates' capabilities - what can they get done or contribute when they work in a team, under the circumstances that might arise during a corporate or project lifecycle? They may not have certain skills & knowledge, but if they can acquire, assimilate & utilise quickly, or have other skills & knowledge that could bring about the same results, or they could effectuate other team members to deliver the same results, then not having those skills is not an issue at all.

These changes has been subtly happening in schools and universities for quite some time - instead of asking students to do a test or write a dissertation, they now do projects and group work; internships and work experiences are expected for university students and a good-to-have for secondary school students. Using the old 'skills & knowledge' model, these changes are to equip students with 'communication' and 'collaboration' skills and skills that cannot be attained or practised through sit-and-write exams; but viewing it from our new angle, this could be better interpreted it as a recognition that acquiring skills & knowledge is insufficient, and it is ensuring that the students acquire the capabilities to utilise skills & knowledge and achieving the end result with their fellow team members that's the crux of education.

The "learning & development" teams in companies should be asking "what capabilities do you need to acquire", and allow them to participate in different projects and take up new roles within those projects to acquire these capabilities. A new workplace situation calls for a new set of questions to be asked and reflected upon. These teams have their own learning & development to do, it seems.