Last November, I
wrote about the competencies required to be licensed by the US Coast Guard for working on a tugboat. Pretty dry (no pun intended) material, but the sort of detailed technical information I like because it creates a very specific picture of the topic.
This week
The New Yorker has an entire
article devoted to the details of what's involved in operating a tugboat. Naturally, the story that staff writer
Burkhard Bilger tells is far more colorful than a set of competency matrices. Bilger reports on one family's involvement in running tugboats over a period that dates back to the sixties, meaning he covers the time both before and after the Coast began tightening licensing requirements.
The family of Latham Smith, which now has two factions each operating its own tugboat, bases its operations in Morgan City LA. Here are some excerpts from Bilger's report, focused on the contrast between old-style and new-style tugboating:
The Smiths are from Florida originally, of Irish and British extraction, but the Cajuns have accepted them as their own. Latham is something of a legend in the towing world. When he and [first wife] Elsbeth first took to the sea, in the late sixties, they seemed like characters from a picture book: the little tugboat family, island-hopping across the Caribbean, homeschooling five children as they went. Together and separately, Latham and his children have weathered cyclones on the Atlantic, towed barges up the Amazon, and circumnavigated the globe, even as the industry around them has grown ever more regulated and safety-conscious.
. . .
"When we started out, you could do anything," Elsbeth says. "You could pick up your crew from the homeless section of the DuPont Plaza parking lot and take 'em out and sober 'em up." ... "The other tugboats, they always went for the old alkies and the deadbeat people," Elsbeth says. "We took a different approach," ... Latham took to hiring any sailor or surfer who wandered past and whose conversation he could half abide. "It was the time of the flower children, the Beatles, and the long skirts," Elsbeth says. "We found people everywhere, just everywhere — beautiful young people. These hippies would come down on a one-way ticket from Florida to Rincón, Puerto Rico, and they'd run out of money and get desperate. So we'd hire them just for the ride back to the States." ...
When regulations began to tighten, in the seventies, and a minimum of two licensed sailors were required on every tug, Latham and Elsbeth both put in for captain's licenses.
. . .
... the footloose spirit that once sent sailors to sea has been slowly starched out of the business — mostly with good reason. Beginning with the Exxon Valdez oil spill, in 1989, regulations have ratcheted up with each high-profile accident ...
Most tug captain's licenses now require at least three years' training at sea, if not a four-year degree from a maritime academy. Background checks, safety inspections, and drug and alcohol tests are mandatory, as are certifications in radar, firefighting, first aid, and social responsibility. As a result, in the past decade oil spills have decreased by more than eighty per cent compared with the nineteen-nineties, and crew fatalities and injuries have been nearly cut in half.
... the tramping days of Latham's youth, when a sailor could spend his shore leave exploring the markets of Bangkok, the bars of Panama City, are gone.
. . .
Technology has taken some of the risk out of the business. Many new tugs can be steered by joystick — though most captains disdain it — and trainees often learn to operate them on land, in mock wheelhouses surrounded by virtual harbors. (When I tried my hand at this recently at the Maritime Simulation Institute, in Middletown, Rhode Island, I spent an hour doing doughnuts in Los Angeles Harbor; I couldn't seem to stop ramming my bow into the container ship I was towing — and that was before the computer called in the heavy fog and twenty-foot seas.) But a virtual storm is still no substitute for a howling gale, or the mad tilt and groaning steel of a ship on rough seas.
If this story of one family's life in the the tugboating world appeals to you, by all means get yourself a copy of the April 19
New Yorker and read the whole thing. The entire issue is dedicated to the theme of travel, so if that's your cup of tea, you'll find other articles of interest as well. The table of contents is
here.
###Labels: Competencies, Expertise, Hiring and getting hired, Humor, Simulation, Teaching
Timothy Murphy on Jazz Improvisation
Readers of this blog will know that I'm fascinated by the process of improvisation, a subject I discussed most recently
here. I'm firmly convinced that one of the prime aspects of expertise is the ability to conjure up promising ideas on the fly. I'm also confident that this is a skill that can be steadily honed through practice.
The Spring 2010 issue of
Johns Hopkins Magazine gives its last page over to a
summary of how an accomplished jazz pianist in an ensemble undertakes to improvise. The summary is provided by
Timothy Murphy, a keyboardist and teacher at Hopkins'
Peabody Conservatory and at
Towson University.
Murphy's offers these four bits of advice:
- First, clear your mind. Get rid al all the words coursing through your head. Sit quietly about 30 seconds before putting your hands on the keyboard.
- Improv is a conversation. Watch the facial expressions of the other players, listen to them, try to respond to what they do with the least predictable thing that's still musical.
- If you suddenly go blank, just smile and keep pressing the keys until something good happens. Now and then, the best thing to "play" is silence.
(Wesley Bedrosian)
A good solo should have a shape. Pay attention to the inner voice that's telling you that you've reached a high point and it's time to wind it down and get out elegantly.
The most direct business application of Murphy's schema is to meetings in which creative thinking is needed, for example, concerning the design of a new product or service or the solution to a problem. An individual's contributions don't have to be "the least predictable thing," but they certainly shouldn't be trite. Everybody should contribute, but no one should overwhelm the conversation. Soliloquies should "have a shape" and, even if the speaker doesn't end elegantly, he or she should not run on.
###Labels: Arts, Cognition, Collaboration, Expertise, Innovation
Gary Klein on Decision Making
Gary Klein, a research psychologist, published his most recent book,
Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making, in October of last year. The book continues in the vein he has been exploring for many years, namely reporting on what his research reveals concerning the way in which experts make decisions.
The MIT Press's summary of Klein's book explains that he offers
... realistic ideas about how to make decisions in real-life settings. He provides many examples — ranging from airline pilots and weather forecasters to sports announcers and Captain Jack Aubrey in Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander novels — to make his point. All these decision makers saw things that others didn't. They used their expertise to pick up cues and to discern patterns and trends. We can make better decisions, Klein tells us, if we are prepared for complexity and ambiguity and if we will stop expecting the data to tell us everything.
The
first chapter of the book is available online. You can preview the book — on a limited basis — at
Google Books.
There is an informative
review at
Diane Coyle's blog, and you can read an excellent overview of Klein's work, as of ten years ago, in an
article Fast Company published in August 2000. Five years later, Klein was
interviewed by NASA's
ASK Magazine, producing another clear, compact account of his thinking on decision-making.
###Labels: Cognition, Decision-making, Expertise, Simulation
"The Great Influenza" V: Washing Up
There is a little parable in
The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, by
John M. Barry, that I particularly like:
… a young graduate student entered a laboratory and saw a renowned Harvard professor at the sink washing glassware while his technician was performing a complex task at the workbench. The student asked him why the technician was not washing the glassware. “Because,” the professor replied, “I always do the most important part of the experiment and in this experiment the most important thing is the cleanliness of the glassware.” [pp. 286-287]
###Labels: Coaching, Expertise, Humor, Professionalism, Quality
"The Great Influenza" IV: Interpreting Experiments
In
The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History,
John M. Barry devotes considerable attention to the challenges faced by the scientists trying to identify the pathogen behind the "Spanish flu" of 1918.
At one point, Barry notes:
Not all scientific investigators can deal comfortably with uncertainty and those who can may not be creative enough to understand and design the experiments that will illuminate a subject — to know both where and how to look. Others may lack the confidence to persist. Experiments do not simply work Regardless of design and preparation, experiments — especially at the beginning, when one proceeds by intelligent guesswork — rarely yield the results desired. An investigator must make them work. The less known, the more one has to manipulate and even force experiments to yield and answer.
Which raises another question: How does one know when one knows? In turn this leads to more practical questions: How does one know when to continue to push an experiment? And how does one know when to abandon a clue as a false trail?
No one interested in any truth will torture the data itself, ever. But a scientist can — and should — torture an experiment to get data, to get a result, especially when investigating a new area. A scientist can — and should — seek any way to answer a question: if using mice and guinea pigs and rabbits does not provide a satisfactory answer, then trying dogs, pigs, cats, monkeys. And if one experiment shows a hint of a result, the slightest bump on a flat line of information, then a scientist designs the next experiment to focus on that bump, to create conditions more likely to get more bumps until they become either consistent and meaningful or demonstrate that the initial bump was mere random variation without meaning. [pp. 263-264]
###Labels: Critical thinking, Expertise
The Components of Capacity Building
I'm always on the lookout for materials that clarify central concepts in the training area. One such concept, important in work aimed at reducing poverty in developing countries, is capacity building.
1 The
training materials placed online by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) mentioned in my last two posts include a
paper (pdf) on policy processes that has a helpful section on the components of capacity building in irrigated agriculture.
Olivier Dubois, an FAO consultant, explains the three levels of capacity development:
Level I, the enabling environment, represents the broad national and international context within which irrigated agriculture can develop. It is concerned with policy at the highest levels in government, the socio-economic conditions that enable or constrain development and the legal framework that provides, for example farmers with security of tenure for land and water and the power to seek legal redress when contracts are broken. This level can have immense influence over what happens at the lower levels. It is often given insufficient attention, particularly in project interventions, because it is seen as too difficult and diffuse to address.
Level II is the organizational level, which refers to the wide range of organizations involved in irrigation such as water user organizations, research groups, government extension agencies and private companies that share common objectives such as improved livelihoods at the farming level, improved water management or increased agricultural productivity at a national level. The capacity of an organization is embedded in the ability of its individuals to work together within established rules and values and to interact with other organizations.
Level III, the individual level, is the most structured and familiar part of capacity development and includes education and training of the various stakeholders, from farmers to local professionals.
Dubois goes on to enumerate the components of each level:
Level I — Environment- Policy framework
- Legal and regulatory framework
- Management accountability
- Resources
- Processes and relationships
Level II — Organization- Strategic management
- Culture/structure
- Processes
- Human resources
- Resources – financial
- Resources – information
- Infrastructure
- Interrelationships
Level III — Individual- Job skills and needs
- Professional development
- Access to information
- Performance/incentives
- Values/attitudes/motivation
- Relationships/interdependence
- Professional integrity
- Communication skills
With this enumeration of the levels and components of capacity development, policymakers have a schema for analyzing where significant gaps exist that need to be addressed in order to achieve real progress in improving agriculture in poor areas of the world.
Dubois' section on capacity development includes additional guidance, e.g., on conditions that make it difficult to develop capacity and conditions that are favorable to capacity development. The section is well worth reading in its entirety.
__________
1 Some previous posts touching on capacity building are
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here, and
here.
###Labels: Coaching, Expertise
Adam Smith Retrospective IV
From Book I, Chapter II, of the original 1776 edition of Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations . . .
... thus the certainty of being able to exchange all that surplus part of the produce of his own labour, which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men's labour as he may have occasion for, encourages every man to apply himself to a particular occupation, and to cultivate and bring to perfection whatever talent or genius he may possess for that particular species of business.
The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature as from habit, custom, and education. When they came into the world, and for the first six or eight years of their existence, they were perhaps very much alike, and neither their parents nor playfellows could perceive any remarkable difference. About that age, or soon after, they come to be employed in very different occupations. The difference of talents comes then to be taken notice of, and widens by degrees, till at last the vanity of the philosopher is willing to acknowledge scarce any resemblance. But without the disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, every man must have procured to himself every necessary and conveniency of life which he wanted. All must have had the same duties to perform, and the same work to do, and there could have been no such difference of employment as could alone give occasion to any great difference of talents.
[Source: www.adamsmith.org]See also:
"The Expert Mind".
###Labels: Business acumen, Expertise, Motivation, Productivity
Learning from Positive Outliers in Healthcare
Back in December, I wrote a
series of posts dealing with learning from "positive deviance." Positive deviants are people who manage to do a way-above-average job of solving a particular problem, despite having no more resources than others coping with the same issue.
A topical example of this approach to identifying good solutions to what can seem to be intractable problems is provided by an op-ed
column published on August 12 in the
New York Times, written by
Atul Gawande (Brigham and Women's Hospital),
Donald Berwick (Institute for Healthcare Improvement),
Elliott Fisher (Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice), and
Mark B. McClellan (Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform).
These four healthcare professionals report on a study they conducted in which they set out to find regions of the US that are "positive outliers" in terms of:
- per capita Medicare costs
- effectiveness, as measured by an array of federal quality metrics
From the 74 regions that fit their criteria, the authors chose ten to come to a meeting in Washington where regional healthcare leaders "could explain how they do what they do." The authors found a variety of successful approaches to controlling costs while maintaining quality:
- "Some have followed the Mayo model, with salaried doctors employed by a unified local system focused on quality of care."
- Some, with "several medical groups whose physicians are paid on a traditional fee-for-service basis," have been able to find "ways to protect patients against the damaging incentives of a system that encourages fragmentation of care and the pursuit of revenues over patient needs."
- "The physicians and hospital leaders from Cedar Rapids told us how they have adopted electronic systems to improve communication among physicians and quality of care."
- "The team from Portland told us of a collaboration of doctors, state officials, insurers and community leaders to improve care. For more than four years, physicians have been tracking some 60 measures of quality, like medication error rates for their patients, and meeting voluntary cost-reduction goals."
- "Asheville, after gaining state support to avoid antitrust concerns, merged two underutilized hospitals."
- "In Sacramento, a decade of fierce competition among four rival health systems brought about elimination of unneeded beds, adoption of new electronic systems for patient data and a race to raise quality."
In sum:
In their own ways, each of these successful communities tells the same simple story: better, safer, lower-cost care is within reach. Many high-cost regions are just a few hours’ drive from a lower-cost, higher-quality region. And in the more efficient areas, neither the physicians nor the citizens reported feeling that care is “rationed.” Indeed, it’s rational.
As the healthcare reform debate continues, I will be interested to see how much weight is given to the experience of the positive outliers whose approaches are outlined in above.
###Labels: Decision-making, Expertise, Knowledge management
Tempered Trust
In the June 2009 issue of the
Harvard Business Review,
Roderick M. Kramer, a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business,
explains a concept that he refers to as "tempered trust." This is an attitude toward trusting people that is prudent, rather than being either unduly credulous or unduly suspicious.
Kramer argues:
We can never be certain of another's motivations, intentions, character, or future actions. ... That said, there is much that you can do to reduce the doubt — in particular, by adjusting your mind-set and behavioral habits.
Kramer offers seven rules for tempering trust:
- Know yourself. Ask yourself what your disposition toward trust is.
Someone who tends to trust people too readily must work on improving his/her ability to interpret the cues people send out, bearing in mind that just about "any indicator of trustworthiness can be manipulated or faked."
On the other hand, a person who is good at reading cues, but still hesitates to form trusting relationships, needs to develop more receptive behaviors.
- Start small. Take incremental steps, with further steps contingent on reciprocity. This way, you control the risk that the other party will exploit your good will. On an encouraging note, Kramer advises that "Salting your world with lots of small trusting acts sends a signal to others who are themselves interested in building good relationships ..." This leads to more positive interactions.
- Write an escape clause. Kramer argues, "With a clearly articulated plan for disengagement, people can trust more fully and with more commitment."
- Send strong signals. Kramer emphasizes the importance of sending clear and consistent signals of your interest in dealing with people who will trust you and be trustworthy themselves. He says, "Most of us tend to underinvest in communicating our trustworthiness to others ..."
The signals need to be unambiguous so that you attract other tempered trusters, while deterring predators, who need to recognize that you are not someone to be trifled with. The idea is to develop a reputation for fair dealing with those who reciprocate, and for retaliating strongly, but proportionately, against those who violate your trust.
- Recognize the other person's dilemma. Kramer points out that "the people we're dealing with confront their own trust dilemmas and need reassurance about whether (or how much) they should trust us. Good relationship builders are proactive at decreasing the anxiety and allaying the concerns of others."
- Look at roles as well as people. Kramer explains, "A person's role or position can provide a guarantee of his expertise and motivation" even when we have not had the opportunity for personal contact with the individual. "Role-based trust is trust in the system that selects and trains the individual."
- Remain vigilant and always question. Kramer's admonition is to keep one's due diligence concerning others' bona fides up-to-date. Admittedly, this can feel awkward because it involves regularly checking up on people with whom you have an established relationship of trust.
For an extended treatment of Kramer's views, you can turn to the the 2004 book he co-authored with Karen Cook,
Trust and Distrust in Organizations: Dilemmas and Approaches.
###Labels: Collaboration, Communication, Expertise, Negotiation, Risk management
Picking Up and Responding To Weak Signals
As a follow-on to my earlier
post on competitive analysis, I'd like to call attention to a helpful article on "
How to Make Sense of Weak Signals" in the Spring 2009 issue of the
MIT Sloan Management Review.
This article by
Paul Schoemaker, research director of the
Mack Center for Technological Innovation, and
George Day, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School, covers a broader range than just the task of scoping out the competition. Schoemaker and Day describe a straightforward way of attending to and responding to weak signals of all sorts that are relevant to one's business, as omens either of emerging opportunities or of looming threats.
A weak signal is defined as a
seemingly random or disconnected piece of information that at first appears to be background noise but can be recognized as part of a significant pattern by viewing it through a different frame or connecting it with other pieces of information.
Schoemaker and Day divide the process of making effective use of weak signals into three phases:
- Actively scan for weak signals. Three strategies to consider:
- Tap local intelligence, i.e., information distributed among various individual locations in which the organization has a presence.
- Leverage extended networks, i.e., networks encompassing partners, suppliers, customers, etc.
- Mobilize search parties, i.e., task forces set up to monitor specific areas of interest.
- Amplify interesting weak signals to help in deciding what they mean. Three strategies to consider:
- Test multiple hypotheses. E.g., you might want to use red teams (MSWord) "to collect and synthesize information to prove that the current plan is wrong and needs to be changed."
- Canvass the collective wisdom of your organization. E.g., you might want to try a prediction market.
- Develop diverse scenarios. "Scenario planning systematizes the hunt for weak signals that may foreshadow fundamental shifts in the marketplace and society at large ..."
- Probe further, clarify, and act. Three strategies to consider:
- Seek new information to "confront reality," i.e., you need to recognize developments that make planning and executing an effective response imperative.
- Encourage constructive conflict "to ascertain and interpret the facts as they are."
- Trust seasoned intuition. "It takes many years of experience, with good feedback, to develop reliable intuition. But once it has been honed, intuitive hunches should be viewed as valuable inputs, along with more analytical ones, for the judgment process."
Schoemaker and Day conclude by reiterating the point with which they begin their article: "The major problem [in monitoring and responding to weak signals] is that managers are insufficiently aware of cognitive and emotional biases that can cloud their judgment when interpreting weak signals."
###Labels: Cognition, Decision-making, Expertise, Management practices, Networking, Prediction markets, Strategy
Mission Essential Competencies
In a 2006 report titled "
Linking Knowledge and Skills to Mission Essential Competency-Based Syllabus Development for Distributed Mission Operations" (pdf), researchers at the
Air Force Research Laboratory provide an example of how the Air Force is using "mission essential competencies" (MECs) to guide training design. The approach they use can be adapted by civilian organizations seeking to tighten the links between needed competencies and the training provided to employees.
The Air Force defines MECs as"the higher-order individual, team, and inter-team competencies that a fully prepared pilot, crew or flight requires for successful mission completion under adverse conditions in a non-permissive environment [hostile situation]."
For air-to-air combat, the seven MECs are:
- Organize forces to enable combat employment
- Detect factor groups [suspicious entities] in area of responsibility
- Intercept and target factor groups
- Engage-employ ordnance and deny enemy ordnance
- Do assessment/reconstitute-initiate follow-on actions
- Remain oriented to force requirements
- Recognize trigger events that require a shift in the mission phase
In order to develop these air-to-air MECs, the Air Force designs training that bolsters specific types of knowledge and specific skills:
Air-to-Air Knowledge RequirementsCommunication standards
Commit criteria
Engage criteria
Follow-on options
Formation
Friendly capabilities
Mission objectives
Package composition (aircraft involved in mission)
Phase of mission
Rules of engagement
Threat capabilities
Time restrictions
Air-to-Air Skill RequirementsAdapts to changes in environment
Adapts to friendly changes
Adapts to threat changes
Anticipates problems
Builds picture
Controls intercept geometry
Develops new options
Executes merge game plan
Executes short range game plan
Interprets sensor output
Listens
Maintains formation
Makes assessment
Manages mission timing
Manages stress
Multi-tasks
Prioritizes communications
Radar mechanization
Rebuilds picture
Reforms
Selects tactic
Sorts information
Sorts targets
Speaks clearly
Switchology (which switch to flip when)
Subject matter experts are surveyed to identify "critical experiences," i.e., "developmental events in the training of a warfighter, necessary either to learn or practice a particular Knowledge/Skill under operational-like conditions." The experiences (see below) are then incorporated into training scenarios.
Air-to-Air ExperiencesRestricted weapons load
Limited fuel remaining
Operating area restrictions
Restrictions to visibility
Visual illusions
Marginal/minimal cloud clearance
Daytime employment
Dusk employment
Night employment
Mountainous terrain
G-induced physical limitations
Degraded communications
Degraded navigation
Degraded weapons employment
Battle damage
Supersonic employment
Full range of adversary air threat/mix
Full range of adversary ground threat/mix
Operations with friendly IADs
[integrated air defense systems]
Operations with own and friendly ECM
[electronic countermeasures]
Operations against threat with chaff/flares
[Chaff is strips of metal film released to confuse and reflect signals from radar-guided weapons.]
Operations with friendly use of chaff/flares
Operations against communications jam/spoofing
Operations against adversary ECM
Rules of engagement limitations and restrictions
Fatigue/time on task
Task saturation
Limited time to act/react to situation
Radar search responsibilities
Targeting and sorting responsibilities
Air refueling
Live weapons employment
Simulated weapons employment
Various initial conditions
Emergency procedures
Formation responsibilities
Lost mutual support
Dynamic retasking/scramble operations
Various employment altitudes
1:1 force ratio
1:2 force ratio
1:3+ force ratio
OCA escort missions
OCA sweep missions
["Offensive counter air" is suppression of an enemy's military air power by destroying or disabling the aircraft on the ground and/or destroying or crippling the runways and other infrastructure necessary to operate them.(from
Wikipedia)]
Employment with various packages
The aim of the MEC-based syllabus development is to make training as efficient at possible by designing focused scenarios that maximize competency development for a given amount of training effort.
When tested, this approach achieved good results: "experienced warfighters made dramatic improvements in their ability to 'kill and survive' in just four days, through the focused development of their Knowledge and Skills which was facilitated by a well-designed syllabus."
###Labels: Competencies, Employee development, Expertise, Military training
Practice Practice Practice, but Pick Your Parents Too
I continue to have an eye out for evidence that
those who claim that virtually all top experts, in whatever field, have arrived at their advanced capabilities through
deliberate practice are overstating the potential for any dedicated individual to achieve a comparable level of expertise.
An earlier
post discussed how Williams syndrome provides some evidence of a significant role for inborn factors in development of musical expertise.
Now, a brief
item in the April/May 2009 issue of
Scientific American Mind talks about recent evidence of a genetic basis for acquisition of advanced motor skills, i.e., the sorts of skills top athletes require.
Janine Reis, a German researcher working at the National Institutes of Health, led a study whose results indicate that slight variations in the structure of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) affect people's ability to learn new motor skills. The item's author, Roberta Friedman, reports that BDNF "is a key driver of synaptic plasticity, the ability of the connections between brain cells to change in strength. This plasticity is an important factor in learning ..."
The study looked specifically at differences in the degree of success volunteers had in learning how to vary the tightness of their grip on a handle controlling a computer cursor as it moved through a sequence of targets. Volunteers who had one type of BDNF learned faster and performed better than those with an alternate form of BDNF, who "never reached the skill level acquired by the faster learners."
What this says to me is that those who never get as good at golf as Tiger Woods, despite dedicated deliberate practice, are probably coming up against a physical limit on their attainable skill level.
###Labels: Expertise
O*NET IV: Ways to Use Occupational Information
O*NET Online, the application for the general public that facilitates access to the O*NET database, provides an
overview of specific ways in which employers, employees, and job seekers can use O*NET's rich compilation of occupational information.
Employers can use O*NET occupational information to:
- Develop job descriptions
- Expand the pool of qualified applicants for open positions
- Define employee and job-specific success factors
- Align organizational and employee development efforts with the organization's needs
- Refine recruitment and training goals
- Design effective compensation and promotion systems
Employees and job seekers — on their own, or with the help of vocational and career counselors — can use O*NET occupational information to:
- Find out which jobs fit with their interests, skills, and experience
- Explore growth career profiles using the latest available labor market data
- Research a targeted job and related occupations to learn what is needed for success
- Maximize earning potential and job satisfaction
O*NET offers several
self-assessment tools for those exploring career possibilities:
- O*NET Interest Profiler (paper-based and online) — see footnote 2 in yesterday's post.
- O*NET Work Importance Locator (paper-based) and O*NET Work importance Profiler (computer-based) — measures six types of work values: Achievement, Independence, Recognition, Relationships, Support, and Working Conditions.
- O*NET Ability Profiler — measures nine work-related abilities: Verbal Ability, Arithmetic Reasoning, Computation, Spatial Ability, Form Perception, Clerical Perception, Motor Coordination, Finger Dexterity, and Manual Dexterity.
People can use these tools "to make a seamless transition from assessing their interests, work values, and abilities to matching their job skills with the requirements of occupations in their local labor market."
I would mention that when I experimented with the O*NET
Skills Search tool, I did not find it very helpful for homing in on occupations that were actually appealing to me. I ended up with long lists of often-unsuitable occupations.
The
Tools and Technology Search seems more helpful. It lets you search for high-demand occupations that make use of tools (e.g., machine tools, MSExcel, CAD software, etc.) that you are already proficient in or intend to learn.
###Labels: Competencies, Documentation, Expertise, Hiring and getting hired, Learning resources
O*NET III: Occupation Reports
Once you have identified occupations for which you want additional information (see yesterday's
post), you have a choice of three types of report providing information about each occupation on your list. You can save the occupational information in the reports for easy use in word processing, spreadsheet, and database progarams.
The three types of reports are:
Summary Report — provides an overview of the selected occupation, focusing on the most important descriptors. At the end of the report, there is a list of related occupations, and a summary of trends in wages and employment at both the national and state levels.
As an example, you can look at the Summary Report for Training and Development Specialists
here. It's about six pages long.
Details Report — displays all descriptors for the selected occupation. For certain descriptors (namely, Tasks,
1 Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, Work Activities, Work Context, Interests,
2 Work Values, and Work Styles) the report also shows a
rating of how important each descriptor is to the occupation. As with the Summary Report, the Details Report includes a list of related occupations, and a summary of trends in wages and employment at the national and state levels.
As an example, you can look at the Details Report for Training and Development Specialists
here. It's about seventeen pages long.
Custom Report — allows you to select from sixteen different content areas to generate a report with just the information you want for the selected occupation. For certain descriptors, you can also select the scale to display and minimum cutoff scores.
3The Custom Report also provides "crosswalks" (mappings) to other classification systems —
Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP),
Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT),
Military Occupational Classification (MOC),
Registered Apprenticeship Partners Information Data System (RAPIDS), and
Standard Occupational Classification (SOC).
As an example, you can look at the Custom Report menu for Training and Development Specialists
here.
__________
1 There are two categories of tasks.
Core tasks are critical to the occupation.
Supplemental tasks are less relevant and/or important to the occupation.
2The O*NET Occupational Interest descriptor is based on J.L. Holland's R-I-A-S-E-C Interest Structure, which you can read about in
Module 3 (pdf) of the
O*NET Career Exploration Tools Facilitator's Guide. R-I-A-S-E-C stands for Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional occupational interests, as outlined below.
People with
Realistic interests like work activities that include practical, hands-on problems and solutions; enjoy dealing with plants, animals, and real world materials like woods, tools, and machinery; enjoy outside work; and often do not like occupations that mainly involve doing paperwork.
People with
Investigative interests like work activities that have to do with ideas and thinking more than with physical activity; and like to search for facts and figure out problems mentally rather than to persuade or lead people.
People with
Artistic interests like work activities that deal with the artistic side of things, such as forms, designs, and patterns; like self-expression in their work; and prefer settings where work can be done without following a clear set of rules.
People with
Social interests like work activities that assist others and promote learning and personal development; prefer to communicate more than to work with objects, machines, or data; and like to teach, give advice, help, or otherwise be of service to people.
People with
Enterprising interests like work activities that have to do with starting up and carrying out projects, especially business ventures; like persuading and leading people and making decisions; like taking risks for profit; and have a bias for action (as opposed to ruminating).
People with
Conventional interests like work activities that follow set procedures and routines; prefer working with data and detail rather than with ideas per se; prefer work in which there are precise standards rather than work in which you have to judge things yourself; and like working where the lines of authority are clear.
O*NET provides an
Interest Profiler that people exploring career possibilities can use for self-assessment. The online version of the Interest Profiler is
here.
3 Ratings and standardized scores are provided for Tasks, Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, Work Activities, Work Context, Occupational Interests, Work Values, Work Needs, and Work Styles.
An option to view scale anchors (verbal definitions of high, medium, and low numeric values on the O*NET scale for a particular descriptor) is available for four descriptors: Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, and Work Activities. It is a good idea to select "Show scale anchors" for each of these descriptors that you include in your Custom Report because this helps clarify the descriptor's needed level for the selected occupation. An example of a a set of scale anchors is
here.
###Labels: Competencies, Documentation, Employee development, Expertise, Hiring and getting hired, Learning resources
O*NET II: Searching the Occupation Database
There are seven ways to search for particular occupations in the
O*NET database:
- Quick Search — Enter a word, phrase, or job title to search for a particular occupation, or enter a full or partial O*NET-SOC code. ("SOC" is the acronym for the Standard Occupational Classification maintained by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.)
- Browse by Job Family — Displays groups of occupations that are similar in terms of the work performed and the skills, education, training, and credentials required. The specific families are:
- Architecture and Engineering
- Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media
- Building and Grounds Cleaning and Maintenance
- Business and Financial Operations
- Community and Social Services
- Computer and Mathematical
- Construction and Extraction
- Education, Training, and Library
- Farming, Fishing, and Forestry
- Food Preparation and Serving Related
- Healthcare Practitioners and Technical
- Healthcare Support
- Installation, Maintenance, and Repair
- Legal
- Life, Physical, and Social Science
- Management
- Military Specific
- Office and Administrative Support
- Personal Care and Service
- Production
- Protective Service
- Sales and Related
- Transportation and Material Moving
- Browse by High-Growth Industry (In-Demand Industry Cluster) — Displays occupations in industries that are economically important, projected to add substantial numbers of new jobs, or are being transformed by technological change and innovation. The currently listed high-growth/in-demand clusters (some of which seem out-of-date) are:
- Advanced Manufacturing
- Aerospace
- Automotive
- Biotechnology
- Construction
- Education
- Energy
- Geospatial Technology
- Health Care
- Homeland Security
- Hospitality
- Information Technology
- Nanotechnology
- Retail
- Transportation
- Other
- Browse by O*NET Descriptor — O*NET Descriptors are categories of occupational information — Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, Work Activities, Interests, and Work Values. Each descriptor contains more specific elements. For example, Knowledge includes such elements as Administration & Management, Chemistry, Production & Processing, etc.
- Browse by Job Zone — Displays occupations in five categories based on ascending levels of education, experience, and training needed. the five Job Zones are:
- Little or no preparation needed
- Some preparation needed
- Medium preparation needed
- Considerable preparation needed
- Extensive preparation needed
- Browse by STEM Discipline — Displays occupations that require education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. The specific STEM disciplines O*NET breaks out are:
- Chemistry
- Computer Science
- Engineering
- Environmental Science
- Geosciences
- Life Sciences
- Mathematics
- Physics/Astronomy
- Browse by Career Cluster Displays occupations in a particular cluster or field of work that require similar skills. The sixteen career clusters are:
- Agriculture, Food & Natural Resources
- Architecture & Construction
- Arts, Audio/Video Technology & Communications
- Business, Management & Administration
- Education & Training
- Finance
- Government & Public Administration
- Health Science
- Hospitality & Tourism
- Human Services
- Information Technology
- Law, Public Safety & Security
- Manufacturing
- Marketing, Sales & Service
- Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics
- Transportation, Distribution & Logistics
Once your search has led you to occupations of interest, you can generate reports for each occupation at differing levels of detail. The O*NET reports will be the subject of tomorrow's post.
###Labels: Competencies, Documentation, Employee development, Expertise, Hiring and getting hired, Learning resources
O*NET I: The Content Model for Occupations
The US Department of Labor has created an online site — the
Occupational Information Network, or O*NET — which enables users to explore a full range of occupations to learn about the qualifications they require, the type of settings in which they are carried out, and other features that are significant for matching people to jobs they can fill successfully and reasonably happily.
I'll talk about various elements of O*NET in a series of posts this week, beginning today with the occupational
Content Model, illustrated in the graphic below. O*NET uses the Content Model to collect and organize the information that goes into their occupation database.
(O*NET)As you can see in the graphic, the Content Model has six major domains:
- Worker characteristics — "Worker characteristics comprise enduring qualities of individuals that may influence how they approach tasks and how they acquire work-relevant knowledges and skills. Traditionally, analyzing abilities has been the most common technique for comparing jobs in terms of these worker characteristics. However, recent research supports the inclusion of other types of worker characteristics. In particular, interests, values, and work styles have received support in the organizational literature. Interests and values reflect preferences for work environments and outcomes. Work style variables represent typical procedural differences in the way work is performed."
- Worker requirements — "Worker requirements represent developed or acquired attributes of an individual that may be related to work performance such as work-related knowledge and skill. Knowledge represents the acquisition of facts and principles about a domain of information. Experience lays the foundation for establishing procedures to work with given knowledge. These procedures are more commonly known as skills. Skills may be further divided into basic skills and cross-functional skills. Basic skills, such as reading, facilitate the acquisition of new knowledge. Cross-functional skills, such as problem solving, extend across several domains of activities."
- Experience requirements — "This domain includes information about the typical experiential backgrounds of workers in an occupation or group of occupations including certification, licensure, and training data. For example, information about the professional or organizational certifications required for entry and advancement in an occupation, preferred education or training, and required apprenticeships will be documented by this part of the model."
- Occupation-specific information — "Occupation-specific information details a comprehensive set of elements that apply to a single occupation or a narrowly defined job family. This domain parallels other Content Model domains because it includes requirements such as work-related knowledge, skills, and tasks in addition to the machines, equipment, tools, software, and information technology workers may use in their workplace. Labor market information defined by the industry or occupation is also provided here. This domain is particularly important when developing specific applications of O*NET information. For example, it is necessary to refer to occupation-specific descriptive information to specify training, develop position descriptions, or redesign jobs."
- Workforce characteristics — "Organizations ... must operate within a broader social and economic structure ... [so] an occupational classification system must incorporate global contextual characteristics. O*NET provides this information by linking descriptive occupational information to statistical labor market information. This includes compensation and wage data, employment outlook, and industry size information."
- Occupational characteristics — "This domain includes information about typical activities required across occupations. Task information is often too specific to describe an occupation or occupational group. The O*NET approach is to identify generalized work activities (GWAs) and detailed work activities (DWAs) to summarize the broad and more specific types of job behaviors and tasks that may be performed within multiple occupations. Using this framework makes it possible to use a single set of descriptors to describe many occupations. Contextual variables such as the physical, social, or structural context of work that may impose specific demands on the worker or activities are also included in this section."
All of the data O*NET uses to populate the Content Model for particular occupations is derived from research into the character of occupations (whence the data on occupational requirements, workforce characteristics, and occupation-specific information) and the people working in each occupation (whence worker characteristics, worker requirements, and experience requirements).
With the Content Model supplying the framework, O*NET uses 277
descriptors to characterize over 800 occupations and to store that information in its searchable occupational database. Use of the database will be the subject of tomorrow's post.
###Labels: Competencies, Documentation, Employee development, Expertise, Hiring and getting hired, Learning resources
Farmer-to-Farmer Extension Services
Yesterday's
post touted a model for rural economic development that includes peer learning as one of its basic principles.
1A prime example of what this principle looks like in action can be found at the training facility that
Practical Action, a non-governmental organization headquartered in the UK, set up in the town of Sicuani in the Peruvian Andes about 90 miles south of Cusco.
A Kamayoq (agricultural extension agent) assisting with guinea pig husbandry
(Practical Action)The basic concept is to train farmers to deliver agricultural extension services to fellow farmers back in their home villages. These peer extension agents are called "Kamayoqs," the Quechua (Incan) name of people in olden times who were skilled in reading the weather and using their forecasting and other agricultural expertise to advise farmers on such things as when to plant their crops.
In line with another of the principles of the "new development paradigm," the interchanges between Kamayoqs and their farming peers are intended to be two-way, i.e., there is a concerted effort to identify best practices in horticulture and animal husbandry, whether from existing standout performers or from experimenting to see what works best. Learning by doing is central to this Kamayoq-facilitated approach to raising poor farmers' standard of living.
The Kamayoqs live in Andean communities above 3500 meters (11,500 feet), communities barely served by the extension staff of Peru's
Ministry of Agriculture. The initial Kamayoq training at the Sicuani school occupies one day a week over an eight-month period. The topics covered include irrigation, Andean crops, horticulture, livestock, forestry, and agro-industry and marketing. Continuing education is also provided.
As explained in a 2006
article (pdf) about the Kamayoq program,
Throughout their training, the Kamayoq establish contact with technical experts from the private and public sectors and with other farmers, a useful network which they can tap into when they need information and technical advice once they finish their training. This "social capital" is recognised by many as one of the greatest benefits of the whole course.
The success of the Kamayoq program is seen in the willingness of farmers to pay for the Kamayoqs' services; the addition of marketable crops (e.g., carrots and onions) to traditional subsistence crops (maize, potatoes, and beans); higher farmer income, some of which goes for additional education for children; improved disease prevention and treatment for farm animals; and more sustainable use of natural resources.
An important qualitative impact of the Kamayoq program is increased self-confidence among farmers, an attitude adjustment that motivates innovation. Willingness to innovate is essential for continuing to raise living standards in the face of the changes that are occurring in the farmers' physical and socioeconomic environment.
__________
1 Practical Action's methodology draws on the work of
Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator who devoted himself to developing pedagogy for the underclass. You can read more about Freire's work by visiting the website of the
Paulo Freire Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.
###Labels: Business acumen, Classroom training, Expertise, Innovation, Knowledge management, Latin America, Networking, Productivity
Issues to Consider when Tapping Collective Intelligence
In the Winter 2009 issue of the
MIT Sloan Management Review,
Eric Bonabeau, CEO of
Icosystem Corp.,
reviews what we know about the best ways to apply collective intelligence to decision making (the alternative being to depend on a small number of decision-makers who may suffer from biased thinking and/or poor information).
The techniques for tapping collective intelligence Bonabeau mentions include:
- Information markets
- Wikis
- Crowdsourcing
- Social networks
- Collaborative software
What is especially helpful in Bonabeau's article is his discussion of specific issues one should consider when deciding if and how to use collective intelligence techniques:
- Loss of control — Depending on collective intelligence can produce an undesirable outcome, an outcome so unpredictable that the organization is not prepared to deal with it, lack of clarity concerning who is responsible for bad decisions, and public relations problems if outsiders are involved and come up with embarrassing ideas.
- Diversity vs. expertise — The best outcome in some situations is produced by ensuring that a wide variety of perspectives are considered. In other situations, it may be best to sacrifice diversity in order to ensure that needed expertise dominates the analysis and decision making.
- Engagement — "... organizations must provide a continuous flow of new, enthusiastic participants to keep engagement high, or they need to provide incentives to sustain people's motivation over time."
- Policing — to control any mischief-making or malicious input.
- Intellectual property — An organization must both manage its own intellectual property when sharing information with those whose input is sought, and it must "determine whether and how it will assume ownership" of intellectual property that arises from ideas contributed by people outside the organization.
- Mechanism design — The organization must answer such questions as who gets to participate, whether everyone's input receives equal weight, and whether decision making will be distributed (a number of people contribute to one decision) or decentralized (many people are empowered to make their own independent decisions).
Bonabeau summarizes his key point:
For many problems that a company faces, there is potentially a solution out there, far outside of the traditional places that managers might search, within or outside the organization. The trick, though, is to develop the right tool for locating that source and then tapping into it.
Bonabeaue also emphasizes the importance of identifying appropriate metrics and indicators for assessing the performance of collective intelligence tools the organization adopts.
###Labels: Decision-making, Expertise, Motivation, Prediction markets
Laughter is the Best Medicine XXII: Taibbi on Friedman
Speaking up in support of logic and effective writing,
Matt Taibbi takes on two of Tom Friedman's books . . .
Hot, Flat, and Crowded (Published in September 2008)
The World is Flat (published in 2005, subsequently updated and expanded)
###Labels: Asia, Critical thinking, Expertise, Humor, India, Journalism, Persuasion, Professionalism, Quality
An Auditing Simulation
For an interesting example of how an unflashy simulation can be put together and used in the classroom, I'd suggest having a look at what
Faye Borthick (Georgia State University)
1 and
Mary B. Curtis (University of North Texas) have created for helping students develop their skills for conducting audits that involve analyzing company financial information electronically.
In a 2005
paper (pdf), Borthick and Curtis present in detail a simulation of a due diligence engagement
2 for the inventory account of Threadchic, a clothing retailer.
3 The simulation's objectives are to help students learn to:
- Prepare a business process representation (diagram).
- Develop, by financial statement assertion (e.g., "Inventory is $X"), audit objectives for the inventory account.
- Design audit procedures to implement the audit objectives.
- Execute the audit procedures by querying the data.
- Communicate audit objectives, audit procedures, results from execution of queries, matters warranting follow-up, and lessons learned.
As Borthick and Curtis
explain,
The learning objectives represent essential skills for audit expertise in situations where auditors are expected to analyze data electronically to verify the internal consistency of accounting records and to detect conditions warranting further investigation.
. . .
Completing the simulation requires learners to wrestle with ambiguities embedded in a realistic audit setting as they make the inferences necessary to develop an approach to performing the audit.4
Borthick and Curtis note that "students have been surprised at the depth of thought required to design the audit program, execute it with audit or query software, refine their audit programs, make sense of the results, and imagine procedures for resolving unusual conditions."
Borthick and Curtis investigated the ability of the Threadchic simulation to accelerate students' acquisition of auditing expertise. They looked specifically at the impact on learning of using business process modeling (one of the learning objectives for the simulation, as listed above), and
report that "students with business process modeling experience outperformed students without that experience in every audit task" (i.e., developing audit objectives, designing an audit procedure, executing the audit procedure, and interpreting the results).
5__________
1 Clicking on the
Borthick link takes you to a page that provides links to summaries of other work Borthick has done in the areas of instructional design and evaluation of learning outcomes.
2 In a
2004 version of their paper (pdf), Borthick and Curtis provide an answer key for the simulation.
3 A due diligence audit is one carried out as part of the process through which a company decides whether or not to move ahead with a merger or acquisition it is considering. In the case of the Borthick-Curtis simulation, the inventory audit is part of the investigation a potential acquirer is undertaking to determine whether the financial statements Threadchic has provided are accurate.
4 You can look at the simulation as students experienced it
here. To gain access, enter user name "ac863" and password "Qd0319."
5 Here (2004 - pdf) and
here (2007 - pdf) Bortnick reports the results of research conducted with Carol. W. Springer, a colleague at Georgia State University, on developing accounting students' critical thinking skills. A working paper by Springer showing how critical thinking skills developed in an accounting course can carry over into other academic areas is
here (2004 - MSWord).
###Labels: Business acumen, Classroom training, Cognition, Critical thinking, Documentation, Evaluation of training, Expertise, Learning resources, Simulation
