2. Increasing Reliance on Skills and Experience in Job Recruitment

10+ Disruptive Factors Transforming the World of Education and Learning — Consequences, Opportunities, Tools

There is a big difference between knowing and being skilled at something.

Knowing implies having received and internalized information about something. Having an understanding of something means that you know (you have read, studied, informed yourself) how that thing is supposed to work. Suppose the thing is a sport you like, say tennis. Knowing it would mean that you have immediately accessible information in your head about how that sport works, who are the best players, what are the most recent scores and which are the best moves and tactics to win a game. That is what knowing is all about.

That knowing though, doesn’t make you a good tennis player at all. Actually you could be totally incapable of playing tennis while knowing at the same time a lot about this sport.

To survive in life, to win in sports and to succeed in professional endeavors, having the right information can be useful, but having the skills to execute what you need to do is of the essence. There’s no amount of knowing that can save you from starving. No amount of knowing that can help you sell your new product. No amount of knowing that can help you plan for unpredictable changes in your marketplace. Unless… you put that knowing to work and gradually transform it into tangible skills that you can use whenever you need.

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh says:

“I haven’t looked at a résumé in years. I hire people based on their skills and whether or not they are going to fit our culture.”

Intuitively, this is the same thing I have been doing myself for the last ten years or more.

I don’t look at their education in their CVs, but at the positions they have held and what they have learned to do while in those positions.

I talk to them and I try to gauge, sense and feel not how knowledgeable they are, but how equipped they are in being able to plan, execute and look over practical tasks.

This is the reason why many companies show an increased reliance and interest for skill-based hiring practices where the intent is for the applicant to prove, independent of an academic degree, the minimum required skills for the job.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skills-Based_Hiring

“…field-specific knowledge and an ability to adapt are the qualities today’s employers are most likely to value, something backed up by countless surveys carried out around the world.

One of the most recent, carried out by US research company Gallup at the end of last month, revealed that only nine per cent of businesses said university choice was ‘very important’ when it comes to selecting future employees.

Four out of five said ‘applied skills’ were of the utmost importance, while 84 per cent said they looked for ‘knowledge in the field’.

Metro (2014)
http://metro.co.uk/2014/03/17/relax-students-employers-dont-care-where-you-go-to-university-any-more-4575722/

I myself, when looking for experts and collaborators, do value more applied skills than general knowledge.

For example: one thing is to know what digital images are, which are their characterizing formats and what tools can be used to edit and modify them. One other is to be able to do those things with practical competence, precision and speed. Either you have cultivated the practical, pragmatical skill or you have not.

That’s why if most of your academic preparation is based on reading and learning what are the standards, tools and practices, but not on doing real work with them you will find many competitors who can do those things much better than you can, who can command instantly a higher pay and who can do this without having even the shadow of a degree.

Life is about skills, both mental and physical, not about memorizing information about them. Yes it is useful to know in principle how things are, how they do work and which are tools and techniques to do specific things or to achieve certain results, but it is infinitely more useful to learn how to harness, use, create, build, troubleshoot, repair and modify any such thing without the help of others.

Because in the end, if you increasingly rely on notions and information that you have not been able to personally test and verify you will always depend on others.

The bad thing about this, is that under these conditions you will not ever be able to know for sure whether what you are told is actually true or not and how the thing you want to fix or repair actually works. You just take for granted what others have tested, said, claimed and with that action, you altogether abdicate your ability to truly knowing something. Trust and blind faith in what others say, no matter what their experience or degree of expertise, is a sure recipe for not discovering how things really are and how to make them work to your advantage.

Consequences

• Having a diploma or certification in a non-traditional field of work is
  definitely not a passport to get a job. It’s the skill that counts, not what you know in your head.
• Knowing something is increasingly confused with “having information about something” while forgetting that to really know something you must be able to start it, stop it, dismantle it and rebuild it at will.
• “…most data show that degrees are not as highly sought after as relevant experience, which is the cited reason for student loan debt that cannot be paid back.”
  The Biggest Commodity: The College Degree and Academic Inflation
• Students look for alternatives, such as free or low-cost courses to learn the skills traditionally offered by academic institutions.
• Learning programs largely based on theory, memorization of facts, will lose competitiveness and students to practical, hands-on, experience-oriented ones.
• Students search for alternative ways to learn more rapidly the skills they are interested in.
• Practical experience, not absorbing or memorizing information, is the key ingredient needed to successfully master any project or endeavor.

Opportunities

• Skill-based training programs, internships, practical workshops will gain in popularity and will see increased demand from those who do not want just a piece of paper, but are truly interested in the actual thing.
• Alternative schools and training institutions spring up offering the opportunity to learn in-demand skills and competencies outside those offered by the traditional academic curricula.
• New organizations and startups offer new, alternative ways to be certified for one’s own competencies and skills, even if these have been acquired outside of the traditional education system.

Resources

Open Badges Project
“Get recognition for skills you learn anywhere.” In 2011, Mozilla announces its Open Badges Project. It is a program that recognizes skills and achievements. It is open to companies, organizations, and individuals to issue, earn and display badges across the web. Badges represent an alternative to accreditation and degrees.

Degreed
Degreed allows students to learn anything using the world’s best educational resources. “Degreed is a free service that tracks and scores all of your education — from books and online courses to formal college degrees.

“Degreed gives users an online, updateable repository for tracking all of their learning. It scores it so that users and employers have a modular way of understanding a person’s collection of skills.”

Skillshare
A global teaching and learning community where practical skills are the focus and where those who teach are not those who have studied books the most, but those who can effectively demonstrate and help others learn practical, in-demand skills.

Focus on Skill Mastery, not Knowledge Acquisition
by Tarmo Toikkanen — Medium
“For historical reasons, theoretical knowledge has been seen as more prestigious than mere learning of skills and craftsmanship. It is becoming clear, though, that pure knowledge is not enough. What organizations and individuals need is competence, which requires the abilities and skills to apply knowledge to accomplish tasks and solve problems. As availability of knowledge has dramatically improved, acquisition of knowledge should be a secondary objective, and education and learning should focus on the mastery of skills.”

Why LinkedIn Should Kill the Resumé and Replace it with the Experience graph by Garry Golden
A fascinating glimpse at what the future of the CV/ resume may actually look like.

Thank you for reading.

I am Robin Good, an independent author / publisher with a terminal addiction: help others effectively communicate, learn and market their ideas by exploring new ethical venues, innovative strategies and uncharted territories outside the mainstream.

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