TM - August 2007 - (Page 35) three pillars of employability: academic education, participation in public employment services, and on-the-job achievement and development. “A lot of Chinese are still ideologists,” Sanderson said. “In the United States, a lot of consumer beliefs are about the brand. In China, that’s too simplified. There may be other things involved. For employees, it’s the same — it’s not just the money. It may be the career path or perhaps respect for them or being liked. “Most multinational companies’ turnover is much higher than state-owned companies’, but in most multinational companies, the salary is much higher than the state-owned companies. Why do they fail to hold on to their employees, especially senior managers? There must be something there other than money. When you design performance management, the incentive system, you can’t just apply one to the other. It has to be modified and changed to apply to the China situation.” For instance, Sanderson said many Chinese employees are extremely ambitious about their career path, so an HR question such as, “Where would you like to work?” won’t bring a direct response such as, “I want to work in San Francisco, where the weather is beautiful.” “If you ask Chinese employees, such a condition is minor,” Sanderson said. “They think it’s irrelevant to their career. They might say, ‘If the place can provide me with a very, very quick career path or can make me a lot of money, I don’t care — I can go anywhere.’ Saying, ‘I would like to offer you a nice package …’ means you don’t understand them. American or multinational companies in China have to think more in-depth than cultural issues and differences.” “What we see are barriers coming down and the development of a horizontal approach — the need for standards, activities and processes that run across these three pillars,” Vervenne explained. “You could think of the term ‘employability’ as the common, umbrella concept. Students need to be educated to be employable. If you’re in a job, you have a need to keep your employability or improve it. And if you become unemployed, it’s time to reassess who you are and what you can do, then get back into the labor market.” As a board member of the European Institute for ELearning (EIfEL), which is dedicated to enabling knowledge societies in organizations, Vervenne has been observing these changes for a while. In fact, he’s involved with government-backed Framework Programs, extensive research projects on alignment to business change and lifelong competency development. “We’re just finishing the prototype of a competency profile framework that is commonly used,” he said. “We did projects on context models for certain occupations. Everyone should have a competency profile, which ideally would be able to be read on HR computers at your first job. Any other public or private organization should also be able to access that same profile. “Of course, this doesn’t work yet because competencies are proprietary models that you need to interpret. What we’re doing — and we do it through HR bodies that have competency standards — is trying to find a common way to describe them. At the moment, we’re finishing a competency profile framework, and we’re going to submit it for standardization.” Vervenne said systems have been created to generate meaningful semantic definitions that link learning to competencies. “It’s used to form a coherent idea of context,” he said. “Competencies should be fairly abstract but made meaningful by being linked to a specific context. Competencies plus context equals meaning, and you should model both separately.” European countries probably will continue to import skilled immigrant workers to make up for that shortfall. But no matter what performance management tactics the EU plans to use, they must be competency-focused to ensure future business success. Vervenne affirmed this was the driving force behind his organization’s competency framework. “Our main focus is to try to make competency a common currency,” he said. “We used to have different currency for every country, but our common currency (the euro) is a concept that stands for a common approach and common standards. It looks like competencies will become the common currency, but I think we’re still about five years away from that.” keep motivation and support it with infrastructure so people can learn whatever and whenever they want and act on their career plans. This has been a slow and tedious process. “If you’re really pessimistic about it, you can say, ‘Well, this is a lost generation, and only the younger generation will be up to it,’ and there are people who are that pessimistic. Obviously, when you’re younger, you’re more eager to learn. The conventional wisdom is that when you reach your 40s and 50s, you’re no longer interested in learning new things. That’s definitely not true, and it’s not maintainable — we have a shortage of workers and experience, and people are motivated to work longer, whether that’s through benefits and money or halfdays of work or being assigned jobs where they can pass on their knowledge and experience.” Europe is also taking advantage of increased regional cooperation to develop a collectivized performance management system that cuts across member countries of the European Union (EU), in which competency profiles for tens of millions of workers are kept in a massive searchable database. This system will rest on what Vervenne calls the talent management magazine www.TalentMgt.com 35 August 2007 http://www.TalentMgt.com
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