Talent = Competency + Confidence
View(s):Talent is an inimitable source of competitive advantage for an organisation and is in such short supply that a war for talent is raging across the world. CIMA, in keeping with its commitment to helping people and businesses succeed, addressed the critical national need for nurturing talent at its annual HR forum, ‘Talent = Competency + Confidence’. The breakfast forum, held at Kingsbury on 17 June, hosted senior HR personnel from leading organisations in Sri Lanka, with Dr. Noel Tagoe, Executive Director Education – CIMA, communicating to the audience the vital role talent plays in a volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous environment.
Prior to joining CIMA, Dr Tagoe, taught at University College Dublin in Ireland and the universities of Manchester, Reading and Oxford in England. Between academic appointments, he held senior accounting and strategy positions with BP and Elf Aquitaine (now part of Total Oil) in Africa. In addition, he established and led KPMG’s financial advisory consulting practice in West Africa for 3 years.
He is a chartered accountant from Ghana. He holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Ghana and postgraduate degrees from the universities of Dundee and Oxford.
Vipula Gunatilleka, Vice Chairman of the CIMA Sri Lanka board, delivering the welcome address said that Sri Lanka is a wellspring of talent and resources and the pressing need now is to harness and nurture this talent through training and development. ‘Competence and confidence are the result of a process of continuous education and experience’, he went on to say, citing the role of the employer as a nurturer of fresh talent.
The main concern of talent today is the delivery of value quickly, whether shareholder value, or stakeholder value, Dr Tagoe said, elaborating on the challenges of a VUCA environment. Additional challenges are brought about by the network and knowledge-based nature of the world today. In the past, your physical assets accounted for 90% of your value and intangible assets, 10%. Now, this is reversed and if your competitive advantage comes from a physical product, reverse engineering is a likely risk, but if your competitive advantage is from talent, it is very difficult to copy culture.
Quoting the McKinsey report, ‘Education to Employment’, Dr, Tagoe spoke of the mismatch between the skill levels of job-hunters and the requirements of employers, saying ‘A lack of available employment is a tragedy, but it becomes a travesty when there are vacancies but people cannot get jobs’. However, in a knowledge economy where skills affect your reputation and relationships, which in turn create 90% of value for an organisation, it is inevitable that organisations seek only the best. The war for talent is caused by an abundant supply of latent talent, but a dearth of active talent.
This can be combated through a partnership between three groups of people – the student, the employer and the educator – who share a symbiotic relationship and an intellectual and practice ecosystem, feeding off each other and creating synergies. Human Resources personnel are placed at the very centre of talent management, talent identification, talent development, and talent nurturing for the employer, making their role in this revolution a critical one.
Are graduates prepared for the world of work?
The equation for skill: Talent = Competency + Confidence
The McKinsey report addressed the question of whether the latent talent inherent in graduates is developed sufficiently to the point that when they get to work they can be deployed in useful work. 60% of graduates did not feel prepared and nearly 60% of employers responded that they did not feel that graduates were sufficiently prepared.
Comparing talent to gold, Dr Tagoe stated that one should know where it is and what it can be used for, and how to maximise it. He said the role of educators is to ‘take raw talent, mine that talent out of the ground, develop that talent, pass it over to employers, and tell them to nurture that talent in the world of work and deploy that talent in order for them to reap the value that that talent is capable of creating’.
One such young talent, Mohamed Akeel, who set the bar high by winning the World prize for Enterprise Strategy in May 2013 and being left with only a few subjects remaining to complete his qualification, while completing his Advanced Level examinations, was awarded a plaque at the forum in recognition of his achievement. Patrick Stewart, Director of Learning, Noel Tagoe, Executive Director of Education and Bradley Emerson, Regional Director, Middle East, South Asia and North Africa presented the award.
Dr Tagoe also underscored the importance of core competence, saying that when hiring someone for a marketing role, if they were very impressive in other ways, but not as competent with their core skill, they should not be hired. A world class professional, according to Dr. Tagoe, combines core skills, business acumen, people skills and leadership skills to do their work in the context of the business, influencing people and leading within the organisation. Talent requires constant development and is high maintenance but also high in value, and in a fast-paced world, the time for development is now.
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