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In Praise of Formal Credentials
May. 3rd, 2012 02:41 pmWhen I joined the federal public service in the mid-1970s, it was much more credentials-based than it is now. If you had a 3-year general Bachelor's degree, an honours (4-year) degree, a Master's degree-without-thesis or degree-with-thesis, or a PhD, you were guaranteed a specific minimum starting salary. And it was expected that for the first few years at least, you would have a good chance of getting regular raises and promotions based on your increasing value to your employer. Even somewhere around the late 1980s or early 1990s, I recall being asked, when I applied for a competitive process, for "certified copies" of my degrees, a request which even the degree-granting academic institutions were unsure how to handle! (The eventual solution? I was to bring the original degrees in when I came for my interview and someone from Human Resources would photocopy them and attach a note stating that she had seen the originals.)
Nowadays, it seems everyone is into "competencies". Sounds great in theory, right? After all, no one wants incompetent employees, especially when even the competent ones are stretched much too thinly to cover the work that needs to be done.
Parallel to that is the demand for "generic" job descriptions to streamline the recruitment and hiring processes. Again, most people would love to shorten the time required to get qualified staff in place. (Though as an aside which merits a blog entry all on its own,I think it must be said that safeguarding the merit principle takes a certain amount of time and energy. An equitable public service with a composition reflecting that of the country as a whole is a value worth striving to protect. Private sector employers, while they might do well to emulate the public sector in some respects, simply do not face the same constraints.)
The problem is that the skill set of knowledge workers is NOT made up primarily of generic skills, and that's precisely what makes those workers so valuable in the first place.
Faced with demands for "competency-based" recruitment and "generic" job descriptions in order to expedite staffing, overburdened human resources officers are understandably inclined to craft job descriptions based mainly on what we used to call the "soft skills", things like being a team player, having a superior service orientation, having good communication skills, being committed to life-long learning, and so on. Certainly these skills are important. But how do you measure them? And should they be valued at the expense of that body of scarce professional and technical knowledge and expertise that is implied by an advanced degree?
What seems to me to be happening is that the "personal suitability" cluster of attributes, which used to be weighted at about ten or at most fifteen percent of the ultimate hiring decision for a professional employee, is now accorded more like eighty-five or ninety percent weight in the decision. The relative weights of the "hard skills" and "soft skills" have been effectively reversed.
But is that just a question of different needs in today's workplace, I hear you ask?
Well, look at it this way. Supposing doctors were chosen strictly on the basis of their "bedside manner" with no regard to their area of specialization. It's all very well to reduce wait-times, to have doctors who truly listen to what their patients have to say, to make the patient's experience in the doctor's office a little more pleasant. But at the end of the day, if that wonderfully personable, service-oriented doctor lacks the expertise and professional judgement to make a reliable diagnosis and prescribe an appropriate course of treatment, the lives and health of the patients will be needlessly placed in jeopardy.
There is a similar problem with this emphasis on "front-line" services at the expense of "back-room" services. Fact is, front-line service is often merely the tip of the iceberg. The back-room services are the rest of it - or perhaps more accurately, the foundation that keeps the building standing and working the way it should. We've seen a few scandals over mismanagement of medical records and to my mind that can only get worse if we continue to focus only on those activities that are conducted in public areas.
A degree or diploma or certificate is, or ought to be, a shorthand guarantee that a prospective employee has at least a certain minimal set of skills and attributes - a necessary and often sufficient condition for at least an entry-level job in that person's field of expertise. And if you had to make the choice, wouldn't you rather hire people based on what they've demonstrated over a period of years that they are capable of, rather than on their bubbly personality that won you over during an hour-long interview?
Nowadays, it seems everyone is into "competencies". Sounds great in theory, right? After all, no one wants incompetent employees, especially when even the competent ones are stretched much too thinly to cover the work that needs to be done.
Parallel to that is the demand for "generic" job descriptions to streamline the recruitment and hiring processes. Again, most people would love to shorten the time required to get qualified staff in place. (Though as an aside which merits a blog entry all on its own,I think it must be said that safeguarding the merit principle takes a certain amount of time and energy. An equitable public service with a composition reflecting that of the country as a whole is a value worth striving to protect. Private sector employers, while they might do well to emulate the public sector in some respects, simply do not face the same constraints.)
The problem is that the skill set of knowledge workers is NOT made up primarily of generic skills, and that's precisely what makes those workers so valuable in the first place.
Faced with demands for "competency-based" recruitment and "generic" job descriptions in order to expedite staffing, overburdened human resources officers are understandably inclined to craft job descriptions based mainly on what we used to call the "soft skills", things like being a team player, having a superior service orientation, having good communication skills, being committed to life-long learning, and so on. Certainly these skills are important. But how do you measure them? And should they be valued at the expense of that body of scarce professional and technical knowledge and expertise that is implied by an advanced degree?
What seems to me to be happening is that the "personal suitability" cluster of attributes, which used to be weighted at about ten or at most fifteen percent of the ultimate hiring decision for a professional employee, is now accorded more like eighty-five or ninety percent weight in the decision. The relative weights of the "hard skills" and "soft skills" have been effectively reversed.
But is that just a question of different needs in today's workplace, I hear you ask?
Well, look at it this way. Supposing doctors were chosen strictly on the basis of their "bedside manner" with no regard to their area of specialization. It's all very well to reduce wait-times, to have doctors who truly listen to what their patients have to say, to make the patient's experience in the doctor's office a little more pleasant. But at the end of the day, if that wonderfully personable, service-oriented doctor lacks the expertise and professional judgement to make a reliable diagnosis and prescribe an appropriate course of treatment, the lives and health of the patients will be needlessly placed in jeopardy.
There is a similar problem with this emphasis on "front-line" services at the expense of "back-room" services. Fact is, front-line service is often merely the tip of the iceberg. The back-room services are the rest of it - or perhaps more accurately, the foundation that keeps the building standing and working the way it should. We've seen a few scandals over mismanagement of medical records and to my mind that can only get worse if we continue to focus only on those activities that are conducted in public areas.
A degree or diploma or certificate is, or ought to be, a shorthand guarantee that a prospective employee has at least a certain minimal set of skills and attributes - a necessary and often sufficient condition for at least an entry-level job in that person's field of expertise. And if you had to make the choice, wouldn't you rather hire people based on what they've demonstrated over a period of years that they are capable of, rather than on their bubbly personality that won you over during an hour-long interview?
