'Many workers feel too qualified for jobs' ran the headline yesterday in the FT. The piece of research underpinning the article has reopenend the debate as to whether the country is spending too much turning out graduates it doesn't need or that organisations simply aren't creating the opportunities/roles appropriate for the talent at their disposal........
Both questions are valid but the answer is a little more complicated (as it always is in human capital management) than we are led to believe - i.e. as in (a) or (b). Both (a) and (b) are right to some degree.
First of all though we need to distinguish between qualifications and talent. QuaLifications are an input. In some jobs they have a greater bearing than other inputs. But most jobs also require a combination of skills, tacit knowledge, behaviours, attitude, aptitude and experience to be able to be done at 'threshold' and high performance levels.
I cannot believe that there is any reasoned argument to deny anybody the opportunity to study for a degree (i) with the only proviso that there is some predetermined assessment to confirm a person's aptitude for this level of study, and (ii) it is not a mickey-mouse subject that one can do in your holidays - i.e. it is relevant to being able to find a job.
More importantly, organisations need to seriously upgrade their approach to job and career design. Far too many jobs are too low level and with some automation many would disappear (note unions). Too little focus and investment is done in terms of basic job design, job enrichment and job enlargement (remember job sculpting? yes that one disappeared quickly).
Here in the UK the government should be focusing its attention on organisations' ability to do the above not on providing basic level 2 qualifications which is compensating for a poor secondary education process.
The science of labour/managerial economics and organisation architecture provides a rich environment for understanding and application. From an organisation standpoint, any proactive work in this area would normally be sat in HR/OD's domain. Sadly most people in HR and OD will probably have done very little in this area through their own standard qualification. And this is one of the differences with HCM versus HR. Its also where strategic HCM comes in.
There have been a number of good books on the subject of qualifications, talent and society which are not the 'headline grabbers' and are worth reading. Two of note are: 'The Mismanagement of Talent' by Philip Brown & Anthony Hesketh and 'The Mismatched Worker' by Arne L. Kalleberg.
The war for talent seems to be only representative of the top 50 organisations whoever they may feel they are. For the rest, there seems to be a war of 'fit' particularly the smaller down the scale you go. The underlying issue is that of expectation from those gaining a degree qualification. The problem is that they study in an environment that is often too far removed (both in mindset and location) from the real world which doesn't help.
I've no doubt that if studying this piece of FT research there will be as many questions around interpretation and pretext to the research and people's expectation as any answers it provides. There are many angles to this whole area and one which I cannot possibly manage here on the blog today.
But there is a fundamental economic question around job creation and human capital development. Recent job growth which is overly reliant on what you would define at the lower human capital end - retail, tourism, gambling etc whilst following the right precept (to a degree) of a higher number of tertiary educated people (though not fixing issues at the primary and particularly secondary tiers) provides us with a growing problem. The HC curve from our HCCI FTSE350 reflected this.
So......feeling over-qualified or under-qualified? There's always pop idol or the x-factor for your talent (or lack of it - then try Big Brother!)...............
