HANDLING KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS OBSOLESCENCE AT WORK

Introduction

The obsolescence of knowledge and skills has long been recognised as a problem affecting individual careers and organisational effectiveness (Encyclopedia of Career Development, 2006). This major challenge require pro-active actions on the part of HR Practitioners so as to ensure that all employees including those in HR are up-to-date in terms of skills and knowledge needed to carry out their functions now and in the future.

Organisations should be open to happenings in their external environment. They should be aware of the various changes in the marketplace in terms of new technology, production process, production techniques, consumer behavior and perception, government changing rules and regulations, and put in place necessary efforts needed to upgrade their internal operations and expand their employees’ capacity to respond to these new challenges.

Obsolescence Defined

Obsolescence can be defined as the degree to which knowledge workers lack the up-to-date knowledge or skills necessary to maintain effective performance in either their current or future work roles.

Causes of Obsolescence

Obsolescence of knowledge and skills at work could be as a result of any of the following factors.

1. Environmental Changes: The world is presently experiencing information and technological revolution where the knowledge and skills acquired yesterday could hardly proffer solution to tomorrow’s problems.
2. Individual Characteristics: Obsolescence of knowledge and skills could be due to individual factors and characteristics such as age, motivation and cognitive ability.
3. Changes in Job Assignment: The era of one cap fits all is gone. Frequent changes in job assignment could lead to a situation where incumbent may lack the requisite skills and knowledge needed to perform optimally on their previous job or assignment from which they were seconded to a new job or assignment due to changing technology and techniques.
4. Technology and innovation:  The level of technological innovation across the world today is extremely high and called for constant acquisition of new knowledge and skills to be able to cope with new technology, equipment and machine at work.  Failure to keep abreast of technological innovations means our previous knowledge and skills are obsolete.
5. Knowledge and Skills Under-Utilization:   skills and knowledge on the job increases and improves based on constant and consistent utilization.  Failure to utilize acquired knowledge and skills optimally leads to obsolescence.
6. Failure to Train and Retrain: Obsolescence results when constant training and retraining is lacking at work.
7. Globalization and Best Practices: The world is now a global village and the various companies across the world now compete on a global scale. This development place demands on organisations to keep abreast of development across the world and adapt their local operations to suit what operates across the world. All these efforts at meeting the world’s standard make local knowledge and skills to become obsolete almost immediately.

The Way Out

HR Practitioners are responsible for managing people at work and should therefore work in conjunction with line managers and the top management to ensure that all employees have the requisite knowledge and skills needed to perform optimally in their various assignments.

The obsolescence of knowledge and skills at work could be addressed in the following ways.

1. Knowledge and Skills Audit: There should be a constant knowledge and skills audit on the job to know whether the job incumbents or potential replacements have the requisite knowledge and skills needed for on the job success. The audit should identify knowledge and skills gaps and fill them appropriately.
2. Advocate Employees Personal Development: Organisations should encourage deliberate efforts on the part of the employees to improve their job related knowledge and skills so as to keep abreast of new development in their field or job.
3. Mentoring: The experienced workers should be encouraged to mentor their subordinates towards acquiring necessary knowledge and skills to keep performing on the job.
4. There should be a Zero tolerance for under-utilization of acquired knowledge and skills at work. The skills and knowledge gained at work should be put into optimal use.
5. Sound Organisational Climate: A conducive environment must be created at work. The work climate should be conducive enough to stimulate utilisation of inherent knowledge and skills rather than stifle it. People should be developed, motivated and rewarded to be the best they could be at work.
6. Specialization: Specialization in job assignment should be encouraged as this enhances proficiency and continuous honing of knowledge and skills.        
7. Learning Organisation: One of the best ways to prevent knowledge and skills obsolescence at work today is by becoming a learning organisation.  Learning organisations are very much concerned with developing and sharing knowledge that is critical to their strategic success (Armstrong, 2003). A learning organisation is skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and modifying its behaviour to reflect new knowledge and insights (Garvin, 1993).

Conclusion

The ability of any organisation to be competitive in the marketplace today is a function of the quality of its human resources. To deliver superior performance at work, employees must possess up-to-date knowledge and skills. Therefore, organisations that want to achieve competitive advantage through people must make constant knowledge and skills audit their priority so as to guide against obsolescence of skills and knowledge, the number one enemy of achieving peak performance at work.

References

Armstrong, M (2003). A Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice, 9^th edn, Kogan Page, London.

Garvin, D A (1993). Building a learning organisation, Harvard Business Review, July-Aug, pp 78-91.

About the Author

Ajiboro Ayodeji  is a Chartered HR practitioner based in Lagos, Nigeria. His areas of interest are Human Resource, Training, and Entrepreneurship. Tel: 2348027807452. Email: hutrenconsulting@gmail.com.

---

The use of this material is free provided copyright is acknowledged and reference or link is made to the www.hutrenhrarticles.blogspot.com. This material may not be sold, or published in any form. Disclaimer: Reliance on information, material, advice, other links and recommended resources, received from Ajiboro Ayodeji, ACIPM, shall be at your sole risk, and Hutren Consulting assumes no responsibility for any errors, omissions, or damages arising. Users are encouraged to confirm information received with other sources. Please retain this notice on all copies.

© Hutren Consulting 2011

  

FROM HR PRACTITIONER TO A CONSULTANT: THE TRANSITION

INTRODUCTION

HR Practitioners are individuals with the requisite skills, knowledge and capabilities needed to expertly handle matters connected with the management and development of people in organisations. They are responsible for providing initiatives, guidance, and support on all matters relating to the effective acquisition, management and utilisation of people at work. HR Practitioners work in conjunction with line manager s and top management to perform four major roles: Acquisition, Development, Rewarding and Development of Human Resources.

The growing demand for the outsourcing of Human Resource functions at work is a blessing in disguise to HR Practitioners with consulting skills. Outsourcing of HR functions often creates exponential demand for the services of independent HR consultants. The consulting skills can be acquired and nurtured by HR Practitioners to prepare them for a future career as independent consultants working on part time or full time for leading consulting firms across the world. They can also incorporate their own consulting firm and thus become a consultant and an employer of labour.

There are three work challenges or job demands that require an HR Practitioner possessing the skill of a consultant so as to be able to function effectively as a strategic business partner. These job demands are outsourcing, in-sourcing and co-sourcing. Outsourcing refers to the action of allowing external vendors to perform an entire HR activity (such as training, payroll, etc.) for an organization. The term in-sourcing refers to the action of the organization performing the entire HR activity in-house, and the term co-sourcing refer to the action of allowing an organization's HR generalist to work with external vendors on some activities, or to the action of allowing HR specialists to work as consultants to line managers who actually perform HR duties. Consulting skills are essential for all HR practitioners desiring to make meaningful impacts in outsourcing, in-sourcing and co-sourcing.

WHO IS AN HR CONSULTANT AND WHAT DOES HE DO?

An HR Consultant is an individual who provide an independent professional advisory services needed by managers and organisations to achieve organisational purposes and objectives through solving people and business problems, identifying and seizing new opportunities, enhancing learning and implementing changes. 

HR Consultants functions in ten principal ways.

          i.            Providing personal counseling.

        ii.            Training and Development of management and staff.

       iii.            Planning and managing organisational change.

      iv.            Improving systems and methods.

        v.            Developing action proposals.

      vi.            Doing diagnostic work.

     vii.            Providing expert opinion.

   viii.            Facilitating talent and business contacts and links.

      ix.            Providing information.

        x.            Providing specialist resources.

 CRITICAL AREAS FOR CONSIDERATION

HR Consultants or who would be consultant in HR could tailor their developmental efforts towards the areas that are prone to being outsourced according to CIPD of London, in their 1998 guide to Outsourcing.

          i.            Training.

        ii.            Recruitment.

       iii.            Health and Safety monitory and advice.

      iv.            Employees welfare and counseling.

        v.            Childcare facilities.

      vi.            Payroll management.

     vii.            Specialist legal advisory services.

   viii.            Occupational health and fitness services.

Practitioners can also venture into other areas in HR that are of great interest to them, outside of the identified areas listed above.

COMPETENCIES EXPECTED OF HR CONSULTANTS

The following are the competencies expected of all HR Practitioners and a must for all who would be an independent consultant. The list was based on the competencies drawn up by CIPD, London.

1. Personal drive and effectiveness.
2. People management and leadership.
3. Professional competence.
4. Adding value through people.
5. Continuing learning.
6. Thinking and applied resourcefulness.
7. Customer focus.
8. Strategic capability.
9. Influencing and interpersonal skills.

HR CONSULTANTS: THE STARTING POINT

The following are the suggested relevant steps to be taken by HR Practitioners desiring to become a respected consultant.

          i.            Professionalism: Membership of any of the top HR professional bodies in your country is a must, irrespective of your years of hands on experience in HR. Until you become a chartered HR Practitioner, you remain a quack, whose opinion could not be trusted. Visit www.cipmnigeria.org, www.cipd.co.uk, and www.shrm.org for more information on how to be a chartered HR practitioner.

        ii.            Learning, unlearning and relearning: Minimum of a second degree is desirable, but having a doctorate degree will give you a clear hedge. Invest in books and HR and Management Journals.

       iii.            Continuing Learning: Take the advantage of the mandatory professional development courses organised by your country’s HR professional body to keep abreast of development in the field. No amount spent on self development is lost; they are investment in your future.

      iv.            Professional Code of conduct: Give special priority to observing your professional Institute’s code of conduct. It takes years to build a name but just a scandal is enough to soil it. Be warned!

        v.            Ethical consideration: Always exercise integrity, honesty and appropriate behaviour in all business, professional and personal activities. You must act within the law and never collide with anyone to engage in unlawful conduct.

      vi.            Develop leadership and Management competencies:    Competencies such as: vision and alignment, strategic thinking, networking, resource management, process excellence, performance development, and goal setting must be developed.

     vii.            Develop HR roles-specific competencies: Develop the competencies of HR Strategists, HR Generalists and HR Specialists. HR Strategists role-specific competencies include: Business Acumen, Strategic Influence, and Change Management. For HR Generalists: Organisational Design, Development and Effectiveness skills; Relationship, Project and Product Management skills. HR Specialists should also have competencies such as: Strategy development, Situational Analysis, Programme Design, Product and Service Delivery.

   viii.            Networking: Establish contacts with people at meetings, social gatherings, seminars and workshops. Use your common sense and make the maxim, "It's not what you know, it's who you know.” work for you. Go everywhere with you business card. Be confident, positive and lively. If you operate in Nigeria, be constant at PPCA meetings.

      ix.            Conscious self developmental effort: The difference between a mediocre HR Consultant and a Guru is knowledge. The certificates and degrees you possess may not compensate for the knowledge you do not possess. Develop yourself, read good books and journals. Read and be aware of the current HR thinking. Go to free academic journal’s websites such as www.academicjournals.org and download top rated journal articles for free. Register with www.blackwellpublishing.com to access the content of all leading journals in HR and Management in general. Also register online with Harvard Business review to receive their daily alerts and management tips for free.    

        x.            Add to knowledge: Work towards writing quality and well researched books. Make sure you have a website or a blog dedicated to your thinking and consulting interests. There should also be a conscious effort on your part to contribute well researched articles to respected trade, academic, HR and management journals.  

CONCLUSION

Are you really serious about being a top rated HR Consultant? The easiest route to achieving this feat is through the books you read and the people you get close to. Read quality books for requisite knowledge and get close to the gurus in the field. I’ll leave you with this quotation credited to Charles Jones, “Five years from now you will be pretty much the same as you are today except for two things: the books you read and the people you get close to”.

References:

Armstrong, M (2003). A Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice, 9^th edn, Kogan Page, London.

Stephen C. Schoonover (1998).  Human Resources Competencies for the year 2000: The wake up call. Society for Human Resource Management.

IPD (1998b) The IPD Guide to outsourcing, IPD, London.

ILO (1996) Management Consulting. A guide to the profession (3rd Ed), ILO, Geneva.

Juliana D. Lilly, David A. Gray, Meghna Virick (2005). Outsourcing the Human Resource Function.   Journal of Business Strategies Vol. 22, No. 1.

About the Author

Ajiboro Ayodeji  is a Chartered HR practitioner based in Lagos, Nigeria. His areas of interest are Human Resource, Training, and Entrepreneurship Advisory Services. Tel: 2348027807452. Email: hutrenconsulting@gmail.com.

©Hutren Consulting 2011

---

The use of this material is free provided copyright is acknowledged and reference or link is made to the www.hutrenhrarticles.blogspot.com. This material may not be sold, or published in any form. Disclaimer: Reliance on information, material, advice, other links and recommended resources, received from Ajiboro Ayodeji, ACIPM, shall be at your sole risk, and Hutren Consulting assumes no responsibility for any errors, omissions, or damages arising. Users are encouraged to confirm information received with other sources. Please retain this notice on all copies.

© Hutren Consulting 2011

TALENT MANAGEMENT: GETTING IT RIGHT

Introduction

Effective talent management must start with having an inclusive culture in place in any organisation that want to get their talent management right.  What is an inclusive culture? An inclusive culture is a culture where all talent is valued and fully utilized to maximize business performance. Inclusion is all about engaging the head, the heart and the hands of everyone. Talent management should focus on making everybody in a business organisation at a particular point in time put in their very best as long as they remain a part of that organisation. It’s the sum total of individual and team performances that add up to become total organisational performance.

Organisations should not over concentrate on attracting, motivating, managing, rewarding and retaining top talents alone. Efforts should be put in place to ensure that all members of the organisation justify their pay by ensuring that their performance commensurate with their remuneration.

Talent therefore, is used as an all-encompassing term to describe the human resources that organizations want to acquire, retain and develop in order to meet their business goals (Cheese et al., 2008).

Goffee and Jones (2007) define talent as handful of employee whose ideas, knowledge and skills give them the potential to produce the disproportionate value from the resource they have available from them.

Definitions of Talent Management

Talent management has been variously defined by writers, HR academics and professionals. Here are some of the often quoted definitions of talent management.

• Talent management can be defined as the conscious, deliberate approach undertaken to attract, develop and retain people with the aptitude and abilities to meet current and future organizational needs (Stockley, 2007).

• Talent management is concerned with the recruitment, selection, identification, retention, management, and development of personnel considered having the potential for high performance (Cappelli, 2009).

• Talent management is the process of ensuring that the organisation attracts, retains, motivates and develops the talented people it needs (Armstrong, 2004).

Talent Management Process

The emphasis on Talent Management is to ensure that organizations concern have the requisite talented and committed people needed to perform optimally in terms of profitability, productivity, returns on investment and competitive advantage.

Talent Management process involves four essential components. These are:

• Talent attraction.
• Talent retention.
• Talent motivation.
•  Talent development.

This shows that competent and committed people must be attracted, retained, motivated and developed by the organisation, now and in the future.

Conclusion

A company’s talent is embodied in the people whose talent and experience create the products and services that are the reason customers come to it and not to a competitor (Stewart, 1998). The responsibility of management should be to attract, retain, motivate and develop competent and talented people needed to compete and deliver superior organisational performance necessary to meet the needs of the various stakeholders now and in the future.

References:

Armstrong, M (2003). A Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice, 9^th edn, Kogan Page, London.

Cappelli P (2009). What's old is new again: Managerial “talent” in an historical context; Res. Personnel Hum. Resour. Manag. Vol. 28.

Cheese P, Thormas RJ, Craig E (2008). The talent powered organization: strategies for globalization, talent management and high performance. London and Philadelphia: Kogan.

Goffee R, Jones G. (2007). Leading clever people. Harvard. Bus. Rev., pp. 72 – 79.

Piansoongnern et al. (2011) Talent management in Thai cements companies: A study of strategies and factors influencing employee engagement. African Journal of Business Management Vol.5 (5), pp. 1578-1583.

Stewart AT (1998). Intellectual Capital. Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

Stockley D (2007). Talent management concept - definition and explanation [Online]. Available from

http://derekstockley.com.au/newsletters-05/020-talentmanagement. html.

About the Author

Ajiboro Ayodeji is a Chartered HR Practitioner based in Lagos, Nigeria. Tel: 2348027807452. Email: hutrenconsulting@gmail.com.

©Hutren Consulting 2011

INITIATING CHANGE AT WORK

Introduction

The saying that ‘the only thing that is constant is change’ is ever true. Change is important in all facet of life. The various departments in all business organisations must embrace change in all its ramifications. The employees at work, being the most valued assets in any organisation must be carried along in all change initiatives at work. Change must not be forced on employees without any input from them. The employees should also cooperative with management when laudable changes are being introduced at work. They should not stand in the way of progress of their organisations; they should always buy into all the positive change initiations of their organisations without any sentiment.

Meaning of Change

Change in terms of Human Resource Management or organisational development is all about the modification or outright replacement of any existing structure, procedure, process, system and technology as it affects people, process, system, product, market, service offer and the organisation as a whole to achieve better performance or to respond to internal strength and weaknesses and the external environmental opportunities and threats.  Change management is an important element of achieving organisational development and transformation.

Types of change

There are two major types of change. We have strategic change and operational change. Strategic change is basically about organisational transformation. This focuses on taking an organisation to a desired future position. That is, taking the organisation from where it is now to where the organisation wants to be. Strategic change is broad and affects long-term, corporate and organisation wide issues.

Operational change addresses the present organisational challenges. It relates to the introduction of new structures, systems, procedures and technology that are expected to have an immediate impact on the operation in some parts of the organisation.

Overcoming resistance to change at work

The first thing that must be clear to all Change Agents and organisations that want to initiate change is that people will always resist change at inception. To carry people along and achieve the successful change initiation, they must understand why people resist change.

People resist change for so many reasons. They resist change because of the fear of unknown, fear of losing money, threat to job security and because of uncertainty. To remove people’s fear about change, they must be involved in the change process. Change agents must carry everybody along before change is introduced. Those to be directly affected by the change must be noted and their sources of fear understood and clarified. People must be assured that the change is for the benefit the organisation as well as for everybody.

Steps towards initiating change at work

The following actions must be in place when initiating change at work.

·         Get the commitment of top management and those to be affected by the change.

·         The change agents must have clear understanding of the culture of the organisation and a detailed understanding of its people.

·         The people to be affected by the change must be carried along from start to finish.

·         Focus on achieving result through changing system, structure and systems rather than changing organisational culture and attitude of people.

·         Make it clear to everybody that change is desirable in order for the organisation and its people to keep abreast of new development and innovations in the globalised world economy.

·         Provide all the needed assistance, tools and encouragement necessary for easy transition into the new system, for all.

·         Expect resistant to change and treat same as a challenge expected when initiating change.

Conclusion

Change is desirable. Change is a must. But change must be introduced with care. Everybody to be affected must be carried along. Change agents must be well trained in the process of change initiation in order to reduce unnecessary resistance and tension. Any organisation that fails to change and innovate is digging its own grave. Change is good.

References

Armstrong, M (2003) A Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice, 9^th edn, Kogan Page, London.

BecKhard, R (1969) Organisation Development: Strategy and models, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass.

Nadler, D.A (1980) Concepts for the management of organisational change, in Reading in the Management of Information, ed M.L .Tushman and W.L. Moore, Ballinger, New York.

Writer’s Profile

Ajiboro Ayodeji is a Chartered HR Practitioner based in Lagos, Nigeria. Tel: 2348027807452. Email: hutrenconsulting@gmail.com.

©Hutren Consulting 2011