Today's company is not the same as yesterday's, the changes that arise daily in the world notably influence the daily actions of each company; With this, each of its components must be molded to optimally adjust to these changes.
Each productive factor must work effectively in achieving the objectives that these changes entail; and it is here where the treatment of human resources as human capital is carried out, it is this factor that must be considered of real importance to increase their capacities and raise their skills to the point where it is found as a factor capable of using yourself and give your best to your work, feeling satisfied with what you do and how you are recognized.
The management that is beginning to take place now is no longer based on elements such as technology and information; but that "the key to successful management lies in the people who participate in it."
What is needed today is to let go of the fear produced by the unknown and enter the adventure of internally changing, continuously innovating, understanding reality, facing the future, understanding the company and our mission in it.
An indispensable tool to face this challenge is Competency Management; Such a tool delves into the development and involvement of Human Capital, since it helps to raise to a degree of excellence the competencies of each of the individuals involved in what to do with the company.
Competency Management becomes a continuous channel of communication between workers and the company; It is now when the company begins to involve the needs and desires of its workers in order to help them, support them and offer them personal development capable of enriching the personality of each worker.
Human capital and skills management
Definition of some terms used:
Capital: amount of money or value that produces interest or utility. Element or factor of the production formed by the accumulated wealth that in any aspect goes back to that union of work and natural agents.
Human: relative to man or his own.
Management: carry out actions to achieve objectives
Competition: aptitude; quality that makes the person fit for a purpose. Sufficiency or suitability to obtain and exercise a job. Suitable, capable, skilled or purposeful for one thing. Capacity and disposition for good performance.
These separate terms do not give us much clarity or light on their use in the administration of HR, however we will see the interactions that occur between them.
Human Capital: It is the increase in the production capacity of labor achieved with improvements in the capacities of workers. These enhanced abilities are acquired through training, education, and experience. It refers to the practical knowledge, acquired skills, and abilities learned from an individual that potentially do so. Figuratively speaking, it refers to the term capital in its connection with what might be better called "quality of work" is somewhat confusing. In the strictest sense of the term, human capital is not really capital at all. The term was coined to make a useful illustrative analogy between investing resources to increase the stock of ordinary physical capital (tools, machines, buildings, etc.) to increase the productivity of labor and of "investment" in education or training of the labor force as alternative means of achieving the same general objective of increasing productivity.
Management By Competition: An indispensable strategic tool to face the new challenges imposed by the environment. It is to promote at the level of excellence individual competencies, according to operational needs. It guarantees the development and management of people's potential, "of what they know how to do" or could do.
Why is the development of Human Capital necessary for the Company?
We know that advanced technology is essential to achieve the productivity that the market demands today, but we also see that the success of any undertaking depends mainly on the flexibility and innovation capacity of the people who participate in the organization.
Furthermore, in today's era, technology and information are available to all companies, so the only competitive advantage that can differentiate one company from another is the ability of people within the organization to adapt to change. This is achieved through the strengthening of training and continuous learning in people so that education and experiences are measurable and even more, valued according to a system of competencies.
Gary Becker and his work in the concept of human capital.
This American economist was awarded the Nobel Prize for working with the concept of Human Capital. However, for a long time his work on this subject was ignored and criticized by the world's leading economists, who did not consider him a true peer for dedicating his study to this concept by extending the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior. and interaction, including one that has no relationship with the market. Becker began to study knowledge societies and concluded with his study that his greatest treasure was the human capital that they possessed, that is, the knowledge and skills that are part of people, their health and the quality of their work habits.,It also manages to define human capital as important for the productivity of modern economies since this productivity is based on the creation, dissemination and use of knowledge.
Knowledge is created in companies, laboratories and universities; It is disseminated through families, education centers and jobs and is used to produce goods and services. Although before it was considered that the priority was economic development and that later everything else would come - education, housing and health - today it is completely different since the link between education and economic progress is essential. Becker points this out as follows: "The increasing importance of human capital can be seen from the experiences of workers in modern economies that lack sufficient education and training on the job."
Why is the development of competency management necessary?
It is one of the main tools in the development of Human Capital. Competency management makes the difference between what a training course is, with a structure that encompasses training, training and experience that are necessary to define for the requirements of a position or identify the capabilities of a worker or professional.
It would be important then, to validate the knowledge or experiences that are more operative - less mental - by calling it in some way, which is a way of "calling" this movement to a greater number of people, and of making it also more understandable and acceptable to all. company workers.
A critical issue that the model directly addresses is promoting innovation for technological leadership, since workers will know their own competence profile and the one required by it as they occupy or aspire, identifying and acting on the actions necessary to achieve the profile. required. Thus, the innovative climate is encouraged from the base, fundamentally through self-development.
All this allows deepening the Strategic Alliance company - workers by generating better HR with career development, mobility, flexibility and greater employability.
It will help to carry out low-cost and high-NPV business projects through the use of the best HR in the company, assigning them according to the needs of each project and allowing the capitalization of existing experiences and knowledge.
Structure of a Competency Management Model (Codelco Case)
Preparation of the catalog of competences: based on the decomposition of the tasks that need to be done for a process, it is identified what needs to be known to do to efficiently execute these tasks.
Structuring of knowledge within a predefined scheme: once the competencies have been identified, work should be done on the clear description of each of their levels, in order to be able to carry out the qualifications efficiently and objectively.
Identify the competency requirements for a job or work team: in this way, the degree of adequacy and the way to cover possible gaps can be individualized, thus identifying collaborators who have critical knowledge within the company and its potential use, avoiding that the executive in a division depends exclusively on the resources available to him, which will always allow the most suitable person to be assigned to the position, and only in the event that it does not exist internally, can hiring be used. from external companies.
How This Model Is Defined
As said, it is the changes in operations that will bring the most important benefits. The model is an essential tool to achieve these changes, since the new work styles require a systematic way to identify the competency requirements in the operation, as well as having them in due time and form.
For this HR management model to be operational, new roles, responsibilities and new processes must be defined, not only to manage the knowledge that CODELCO workers and professionals have today, but also so that this "collective capacity to do" increases through of the incorporation of new practices, new technologies, socialization of knowledge, etc.
Model Restrictions
Resistance to change: It is a natural behavior of the human being before each situation of change, before each different proposal, before everything that is far from any measure of our current thought and action scheme. The person begins by resisting what is new that upsets or bothers him and if he does not reverse that attitude at that point he begins to resist.
Fear of the crane: The value of the resources that have been invested in physical capital by an investor, is can often be easily recovered later (through a resale), however, human capital as part of the nervous system of a specific individual, cannot thus be owned separately from the living body, so that human capital by itself cannot be bought or sold directly in the market. If an employee chooses to quit his job, perhaps due to a much higher-paying offer, or to a competent firm in the same industry, then any past investments the employer may have made to increase the worker's skills are lost to the firm. the minute the worker leaves the door of the company.
The only person who can invest in Human Capital with full confidence that they will not be arbitrarily deprived of their fruits in the future without remuneration is the same individual in whom the investment is made.
Attached Proposals
Labor Competency Certification System (Fundación Chile)
Purpose and scope
Fundación Chile has started a programmatic line oriented to the development of HR, under the conviction that the competitiveness challenges facing the country require a significant investment in human capital. The Fundación Chile's Labor Competence Program will contribute to this effort by designing and implementing a national system to evaluate and certify people's labor competencies regardless of how they were acquired.
Current situation
The implementation of the national system of certification of labor competence and quality of training responds to the following diagnosis:
Insufficient or poorly systematized strategic reflection by productive sectors on the key labor competencies that they will require to be successful in the 21st century, consequently, Unclear signals to the labor market and to the world of education, training, and training on the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required by the industry;
Low satisfaction by companies with the available training offer, particularly due to their lack of relevance and alignment with their needs.
Formal education certificates that do not guarantee that the person can exercise job functions with the competence required by the company.
Competent workers without formal studies do not have a mechanism that recognizes the learning acquired in their work experience, thus affecting their mobility and career path.
Some consequences of this situation are:
It would be a threat for productive sectors to lose competitiveness due to not having clear standards to evaluate the performance of people and organizations, affecting the quality of their services / products.
Labor market not very transparent due to important information asymmetries.
Increased transaction cost of recruitment and selection of personnel and return on investment in human capital less than expected.
Education and training trajectories with little destination in the case of young people, due to the low relevance and relevance of the education / training offer.
Objective of the project
Develop and implement a pilot experience of an evaluation and certification system of labor competence and the quality of training. Based on this pilot experience, the institutional and methodological bases of a national system of labor competence certification will be designed, jointly developed by the private and public sectors.
Project description
The project includes the sectors, construction, mining and tourism, all of great importance in terms of employment, and for which having competent and flexible strength is a condition of business success.
Fundación Chile will use international experience in competency certification in order to ensure that national labor competency standards are relevant and consistent with the demands for quality and competitiveness derived from a global economy. The main references are the British, Australian, Canadian and Mexican systems.
The project contemplates the following phases
- Articulation and institutional agreements Sectoral studies Identification and validation of labor competencies by each sector Design and pilot implementation of a system of evaluation and certification of competencies Definition of quality standards for training programs Study of institutional and financial sustainability of the national certification system in light of the project result pilot
Benefits
The successful implementation of a labor competency certification system can translate into the following benefits:
Employers will have defined and accepted standards to make their recruitment and selection processes more efficient; support performance evaluation processes with defined norms and standards and, in general, to guide your investment in human resource developments.
Current and future workers will have a mechanism to certify the knowledge acquired and the skills and attitudes developed in their work and professional life, improving their possibilities of labor mobility, within or between different productive sectors, and they will have information on knowledge, skills and attitudes required for the proper performance of their functions and to plan possible trajectories of personal and professional development.
The organizations in the world of education and training will have information generated and validated to guide their program offer both in terms of relevance and quality. The certification system will constitute a decisive incentive for the formal education offer to be aligned with the requirements of the world of work in general.
Conclusions
Until the 19th century, the systematic investment in Human Capital was not important for any country and the expenses in education, health and training were laughable. However, with the scientific revolution that began in the 19th century, education, knowledge, and skills became decisive factors in determining the productivity of a worker. As a result of this evolution, the 20th century, and especially from the 1950s onwards, was the era of Human Capital in the sense that a primary determining factor in the standard of living of a country is its success in development and growth. utilization of the skills, knowledge, and habits of its citizens "this is the age of the people".
According to Becker, the economic successes of Asian countries would not be explained without a well-formed, educated, hard-working and politically organized workforce base. The most valuable natural resource for these countries was the brains of their inhabitants.
It is essential, then, to transform our vision, from the economy to the human economy, from Working Capital to development, empowerment of Human Capital, which is what in this decade will give the company the only sustainable competitive advantage over time.
On the other hand, although the Competency Certification System is difficult to develop and bring to reality, it must be a continuous effort and above all shared by the government, private and educational sectors, in such a way that an alliance between them results in the increase in productivity, earnings, employment and the knowledge-based capital system sought today.
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