I was listening to the keynote address by Moisés Naím, within the framework of the 60 years of the Andrés Bello Catholic University, of Venezuela, in itself, the entire conference is worth seeing because it has no waste whatsoever; However, I want to highlight and share the central message, which words more or less Naím commented, which in my opinion is enormously powerful, especially for those of us who are somehow connected to the development of people, either as professionals or as parents.
Naím said that the “average has died”, today whoever is content with being average will have enormous disadvantages in the future. A student, an average professional who before with his average could access a diploma of any career and thus insert himself into the labor average, today it is more difficult to obtain an average job to have a life like the average and in the future, with all security, you will have a life below the average… this seems like a play on words, but it is a powerful reflection on the quality of the training of people and the challenges that this future, which until recently seemed distant, poses us.
Naím also spoke about the imperative need to seek –as people- a competitive advantage, something special that places us above the average and correlates this with quality. And, it is something, in which we definitely have to insist, we must focus on overcoming apathy, on doing beyond the minimum necessary to stay in a job or to pass the subject, we must develop quality in all daily aspects, doing things well done.
The proliferation of educational offers has begun to change in a very profound way, democratizing training, with educational strategies that require individuals with new skills. Formal education at the higher level is diversifying, perhaps at a very slow pace for what the current dynamics requires, while distance education has been promoted, mainly due to the access to the internet that the majority have today of people; In other words, today we have at our disposal and practically free of charge, a number of resources that can open up the possibility of generating a sustainable and upgradeable competitive advantage, to be above the average.
Definitely, it will no longer be enough to have a diploma from a prestigious university, but rather to develop extra qualities or sustainable competitive advantages, and that we also have the ability to extrapolate them to personal and organizational daily life.
