Have You Worked for One of These People?

Although the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is a classic in the business literature, perhaps the Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives ought to also be a classic,

Forbes' contributor Eric Jackson reminds us of these traits (http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/01/02/the-seven-habits-of-spectacularly-unsuccessful-executives/), and provides examples and warning signs to heed.

Most of the signs seem to come down to an ego-mania that gives the executives rose- colored glasses to see the world and ear plugs to use when the world demands listening to. 

Rethinking Casual Work

As predicted in the 1990s, employment today is increasingly casual.  Casual doesn't mean that it lacks seriousness; it just lacks a long-term commitment.  

In professional employment, that means that organizations increasingly rely on contractors and short-term workers when they staff up projects--and drop them when the projects end.  

In service employment, that means that organizations hire workers on a part-time basis, scheduling them only a week or two in advance, requiring them to be on-call at other times, and often providing fewer than 30 hours per week of work. 

The goal behind such approaches is to minimize labor costs.  And for younger workers, the belief is that such approaches are preferred.

But perhaps the logic underlying that strategy is flawed.  Consider the belief that Millenials seek flexibility in their employment.  According to his interpretation of the Allstate/National Journal Heartland poll (http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/what-the-great-recession-wrought-the-state-of-the-us-in-3-years-of-polls/251010/), reporter Ronald Brownstein found that Millenials, "fabled for preferring variety to stability, also echoed that sentiment" were nearly as likely to seek job stability (that is, a long-term job with a single employer) as those in other age brackets.

Consider the labor practices in retail that favour part-time employment with low wages, flexible schedules, and limited training.  According to researcher  Zeynep Ton (Harvard Business Review, http://hbr.org/2012/01/why-good-jobs-are-good-for-retailers/ar/1), full-time jobs with predictable schedules and decent benefits favour retailers in the long-run.  Secure, well-trained, properly compensated employees may cost more, but Ton's research suggests that the sales they generate far exceed their costs.  

Last, consider permanent employees.  Perhaps one of the reasons employers have difficulty with them is that they require work.  Most of Forbes' contributor Eric Jackson's Top Ten Reasons Why Large Companies Fail To Keep Their Best Talent (http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2011/12/14/top-ten-reasons-why-large-companies-fail-to-keep-their-best-talent/) boil down to a failure to manage the relationship.  

Among his list are failures to give meaningful performance plans and career development, insensitivity to workers' interests in job assignments, telling people how to do jobs, and constantly changing priorities.  

In other words, if people are the organization's most cherished assets, it probably behooves those organizations to actually treat their workers accordingly.  

The Skills Gap: A Real or Imagined Problem?

Several recent articles have explored the skills gap, generally defined as the difference between the competencies that employers seek in current and prospective workers and those that workers actually have.  

Surveys and experts indicate a wide gap exists between the skills sought and those possessed.  For example, writing in the US News & World Report, Ben Baden reports that economists blame part of the persistent unemployment in the United States on a skills gap, adding that numerous surveys say that employers “are having trouble finding applicants who fit the requirements for open positions. “

To support this claim, Baden cites three surveys, all suggesting that employers feel that a gap exists between the jobs they have and the skills of available workers:

• A Manufacturing Institute survey that “found that 67 percent of more than 1,100 manufacturers reported a moderate to severe shortage of available, qualified workers. Of those surveyed, 56 percent said they anticipate the shortage will grow over the next three to five years. Overall, the study found that about 5 percent of current jobs, or up to 600,000 jobs, remain unfilled due to a lack of qualified candidates.” 
• A survey of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which found that “40 percent of the members of the Inc. 500 (a group of the country's fastest-growing companies) reported that the biggest impediment to further expanding their companies is ‘finding qualified people.’" 
• A survey by the Career Advisory Board at DeVry University, which found that “72 percent of job seekers are overconfident and do not possess the necessary skills for the positions they're applying for, while only 14 percent of hiring managers believe job seekers have the qualities needed for their open spots.”

Lacey Johnson, a reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education, reports similar concerns in yet another survey by the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, which found that “More than half of employers said finding qualified applicants is difficult, and just under half thought students should receive specific workplace training rather than a more broad-based education.”  

In contrast, a recent survey conducted by the global consulting firm Accenture found that one of the reasons that workers don’t have the skills that employers seek is that employers aren’t providing those skills. 

“The majority of workers (55 percent) report that they are under pressure to develop additional skills to succeed in their current and future jobs, but only 21 percent say they have acquired new skills through company-provided formal training during the past five years, according to a study released Wednesday by Accenture. For the study, Accenture surveyed 1,088 employed and unemployed workers and found that 52 percent have added technology skills in the past five years, but many hadn't updated other in-demand skills such as problem solving (31 percent), analytical skills (26 percent), and managerial skills (21 percent). 

Most workers surveyed (63 percent) say they have developed new skills through on-the-job experience. Less than half of respondents (49 percent) report that their employer does a good job of providing a clear understanding of the skills needed for different roles and career paths.  

Many workers in this study “have taken it upon themselves to develop skills over time. More than two-thirds of workers (68 percent) believe it is their responsibility to update their skills to ensure their value in current and future roles.”

Indeed, empirical evidence suggests that employers have significantly reduced their expenditures on training (see my 2010 articles with Ingy Bakir on the subject) over the past two decades. 

Wharton School professor Peter Capelli agrees, noting that:

Even with unemployment hovering around 9%, companies are grousing that they can't find skilled workers, and filling a job can take months of hunting.
 Employers are quick to lay blame. Schools aren't giving kids the right kind of training. The government isn't letting in enough high-skill immigrants. The list goes on and on.
 But I believe that the real culprits are the employers themselves.
 With an abundance of workers to choose from, employers are demanding more of job candidates than ever before. They want prospective workers to be able to fill a role right away, without any training or ramp-up time.

But this is all speculation.

Before we point fingers, re-jig university curricula, and push current and future workers to invest their own money in developing skills,  we need to verify that a skills gap really does exist.   

Huh?  If you’re read this far, you’ve seen extensive evidence about the skills gap.  

But this evidence only presents beliefs about a skills gap.  All of the evidence has solely been collected using surveys.  Such surveys, used with large numbers of  participants working in varieties of industries and positions, only identify what people choose to report about their skills gaps.  

But they don’t actually go into an organization and assess that actual match between the competencies sought by employers and those possessed by job applicants.  As reported earlier in this blog, evidence suggests that some employers are immediately dismissing candidates based on the ethnic origins of their names when reviewing applications.  

More significantly, have employers accurately identified the competencies needed in their jobs?  Many methods exist--but nearly all are very time consuming.  For example, conducting a DACUM (a process for identifying the skills needed in a job, then translating that information into a training curriculum) takes several weeks.  Many jobs suffer from scope creep--in which someone takes on more responsibility as they become more experienced and proficient in a job; are employers expecting replacement workers to have the same levels of skill as the departing ones had at departure--or when the worker started?  

Furthermore, truly assessing the skills of workers and job candidates is similarly time consuming.  Conducting a thorough skills assessment with individual workers can involve assessing as many as 150 individual skills.  Demonstrating this, through a portfolio or competency-based exam, takes hours or days, both in terms of preparation and assessment. 

Rarely do employers or workers actually want to participate in such extensive, time-consuming assessments.  

But these are the only ways to actually assess whether the expectations of employers and the skills or workers are in or out of sync with one another.  And that’s important, because much investment is made on the belief of a skills gap, when the problem might be more accurately defined as unrealistic expectations or, as one employer put it when speaking at a 2008 event of the Work and Learning Knowledge Centre in Canada:  “Is it that we don’t have enough truck drivers, or we simply lack truck drivers willing to work for just $16 an hour?”

This isn't to say that the skills gap is imaginary, or that schools are doing a superb job preparing students for the workforce, or that employees are taking significant levels of initiative in preparing themselves for the workforce.

What it is saying, however, is that most of the evidence is based on quickly acquired opinions.  To figure out the real problem and exactly how employers, workers, and schools need to align their efforts requires a lot more digging than surveys that merely scratch the surface of the problem.  And if the results of this digging are similar to those of digging about other issues, the situation will look a lot more complex than it does at the surface.  

• Read Ben Baden’s Are Employers to Blame for the Skills Gap? at http://money.usnews.com/money/careers/articles/2011/11/18/are-employers-to-blame-for-the-skills-gap. Visited November 23, 2011. 
• Read Peter Capelli's Why Companies Aren't Getting the Employees They Need at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204422404576596630897409182.html.
• Read Lacey Johnson’s  Employers Say College Graduates Lack Job Skills at http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/130013/

What? Money in Documentation?

A recent article in the business pages of the Montreal Gazette describes a successful local business that sells templates for standard business documents like policies, procedures, accounting reports, and legal documents.

Among the many issues making this application interesting is that the documents are created to work across companies, industries, and countries, and in many different languages. The challenge to designers is finding what’s common in all of that diversity.

This success story poses some challenges to professional communicators, however. The availability of templates like these could affect work opportunities for policies and procedures writers. Clip illustrations have had a huge impact on the opportunities available to illustrators, so it is likely that the availability of templates for standard operating documents has affected work opportunities for technical communicators.

Learn more about this success story at http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/Documentation+made+easy/4825562/story.html.

Spending on Training Stuck in Neutral

At the Training Conference today, I presented Ingy Bakir's and my analysis of spending patterns on training between 1982 and 2008. As the title suggests, spending hasn't grown in the past 24 years after adjusting for inflation, although it did during some of the periods of the survey.

To see the original article in Training, visit

http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/nielsen/training_201002/index.php?startid=16#/18

The complete analysis is published in the third quarter 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed journal, Performance Improvement Quaraterly.

Some Random Thoughts on the ROI of Training

It's been an interesting period for demonstrating returns on training programs. The Phillipses sent out a call for cases for the latest volume on demonstrating the Return-on-Investment in training.

Not long before that, CLO Magazine published a press release Organizations Fail to Tie Learning to Business Impact from consulting firm ESI International about its "global survey," which reveals that "more than half of organizations (50.7 percent) do not measure the business impact of their learning programs." (Visit http://clomedia.com/articles/view/3965 to see the entire press release.)

The reasons aren't surprising:

a lack of resources and people qualified to track impact, as well as the need for a better understanding of measurement methodologies. Also, up to half of survey respondents in charge of learning program initiatives still do not believe measurement is a priority or a requirement.

ESI clearly does. And as a third-party provider, they do need to demonstrate that their training programs and services provide value to clients.

But the findings of ESI don't really differ from anyone else's results. In fact,
despite sustained interest in demonstrating a financial benefit to training, researchers repeatedly find that organizations rarely track the impact or return of training. In their 2003 article, Effectiveness of Training in Organizations: A Meta-Analysis of Design and Evaluation Features, researchers Winfred Arthur, Jr. (Texas A&M University), Winston Bennett, Jr, (Air Force Research Laboratory), Pamela S. Edens and Suzanne T. Bell (Texas A&M University) found that fewer than 10 percent of all training programs were evaluated for transfer of behavior or impact.

More recently, in their 2007 meta-analysis of 67 studies, A review and critique of research on training and organizational-level outcomes in Human Resource Management Review (volume 17, pages 251-273), researchers Phyllis Tharenou (University of South Australia), Alan Saks (University of Toronto), and Celia Moore (London Business School) found that "training is positively related to human resource outcomes and organizational performance but is only very weakly related to financial outcomes."

The work of researchers Lynnette Gillis and Allan Bailey, in their study of 12 cases for Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, sheds light on why, even organizations that thought their training had a positive return-on-investment, often could not demonstrate it. In some cases, the programs had no clear business objectives. In other cases, the programs went off-track somewhere between request and implementation.

Although I recognize that demonstrating ROI is a cultural practice in business and that, for some projects, doing so makes a good idea, based on my reading and my own research, I'm reaching the conclusion that, for everyday purposes, we probably need a much different way to demonstrate the value of training programs. The measures definitely need to be practical and easily obtained, as well as credible. Most efforts to demonstrate ROI fall short on at least 1 of these criteria.

But perhaps the focus of assessment needs to shift from assessing the course to assessing the function of training. That won't necessarily be easier; for example, many organizations include training expenses into a number of budget categories other than training, including conferences, professional development, even marketing and general operations. As a result, simply finding all of the funds invested in training is an exercise in forensic accounting.

But maybe individual training programs, in isolation, do not have a complete impact on workers. Maybe it's the combined effect of all of the training that does. Furthermore, the mere process of inventorying out all of the training that an organization has invested in might, on its own, provide many sponsors with compelling data that their investment has indeed paid off.