Competence Formula
From my pals at Dictionary.com: competency means “sufficiency to satisfy the wants of life.” Isn’t that awesome?
Perhaps a little more specific: competence is “the quality of being competent; adequacy; possession of required skill, knowledge, qualification, or capacity: He hired her because of her competence as an accountant.“ How appropriate that the example given is about someone hired due to competence, given the topic of today’s post.
The most common reason I’m given for developing new-hire or onboarding training is to reduce the time to competence. When I follow with the obvious question (“what is the time to competence now?”) I get all sorts of vague answers. It seems safe to say that very few organizations have operational definitions of competence and then have also gone to the trouble to track the time it takes to get there.
The details of time to competence is for another day. For today, I’m going to say what you already know:
I say you already know this, but sometimes organizations forget it. Specifically they forget that within this formula (if you will), organizations can choose where they want to spend their money:
- Hire experienced employees at a high cost (salary), provide minimal training and they’ll “hit the ground running.”
- Hire less experienced employees at a low cost, provide detailed training and they’ll hit the ground informed, but relatively inexperienced.
- Hire less experienced employees, provide minimal training and expect that they’ll get experience on the job.
I don’t propose that any of these is necessarily the right choice in all instances, but it pays to realize that there are no shortcuts to this rule. One could make the argument that your customers are going to pay one way or another – either through what they pay for your products and services, or what they “pay” for your employees to gain experience through working with them – but it’s unlikely they’re given a choice, so if your organization is operating under #3 above, it’s probably more costly in customer satisfaction (which means repeat business) than you want it to be.
So then…the questions for the day: where does your organization spend its money in this equation? Where should it spend that money? If the answers to these questions are the same, bravo!
~Geek~
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