Competences of the Future

The future cannot accurately be predicted. We forecast based upon past trends but, with the increasing influence of disruptive social and technical change, the past is becoming an unreliable guide. So how can we determine what competences will be needed to flourish in the future? How should we prepare ourselves to meet the challenges of a changing world? Invest in agility, be open-minded, experiment, and adapt to change.

The World Economic Forum forecasts that one third of skills that will be desirable in 2020 for most jobs are not key today. In addition, the global competitiveness report for 2016-17 ranks qualified employees as 6th of the most important Polish development barriers, 8th in earlier years. Given that OECD research indicates 65% of all children starting education today will work in jobs that do not yet exist, we are facing a great challenge in preparing for that future.

WHAT COMPETENCIES WILL BE CRITICAL IN 5, 10, OR 20 YEARS?

Taking into account the development of artificial intelligence, automation and digitalisation, it will be skills that cannot be easily automated that will be increasingly critical to success. In addition to technological knowledge, it will be critical thinking, effective communication, collaboration and creativity, and in particular creative problem-solving techniques to deal with rising complexity. In all of this, however, the key will be agility, openness to change, and readiness for continuous learning. Nowadays we are looking for employees with the ability to constantly reinvent themselves, who are comfortable with change and able to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty.

With increasing complexity and the ever-increasing pace of change, project management as a discipline is gaining in value and moving away from being niche to becoming an area of strategic importance. This new environment forces a new way of thinking and new definitions of roles, including that of the Project Manager. Organisations need to recognise that it is no longer enough to focus their talent hiring and development on only technical project management skills. Project Managers need to have the ability to deal with ambiguity and to lead strategic initiatives that drive change in their organisation. To succeed today, apart from technical project management skills, Project Managers also need leadership capabilities and strategic and business management proficiency.

THE PMI TALENT TRIANGLE®

The Project Management Institute (PMI) Talent Triangle® captures this new employer-desired skill set, which is a combination of technical, leadership, and strategic and business management expertise. Today’s employers need project practitioners with leadership and business intelligence skills to support longrange strategic objectives. According to PMI’s Pulse of the Profession® report, when organizations focus on all three skill sets, 40% more of their projects meet goals and original business intent.

A NEW BUSINESS SECTOR

Business process outsourcing (BPO) and shared services centres (SSC) is a rapidly growing sector of the economy, becoming an attractive business solution for many organizations. These companies decide to move some of the processes to specialized external entities to be able to focus on their key, revenue-generating business. Business centres employ in Poland around 244,000 people and continue to grow, creating 20,000 jobs each year. More vacancies appear in financial or technologically complex global projects creating job opportunities for thousands of experts whose work is difficult to automate.

Many of these projects are transitions or transformations. Transition in the context of the shared services sector is the end-to-end process of transferring knowledge, systems, and operations from the client to a specialized services unit. Very often, such transitions are accompanied by a type of transformation, from a change in how processes are structured, through to the use of new technologies to drive organizational culture change.

Therefore, a new Transition Manager role has emerged, responsible for carrying out the entire process of migration to its successful conclusion. Because the transition is a project, it is subject to the same rules of project management as any other project; so the Transition Manager is really a specialized Project Manager. To be a Manager of the transformation processes, you must first gain experience in the role of the Project Manager. Transition Manager is the role that combines working in an international, multicultural and virtual environment with elements of both change and project management.

WHAT COMPETENCES ARE WORTH INVESTING TODAY?

Project management will be one of them, although in a new version. Today’s Project Manager should be a leader of change and transformation. However, most of the current project management programmes on the market focus mainly on methods, tools and techniques (one side of the triangle). They rarely teach managers how to lead people through change. You can hardly find any learning modules on leadership, including dealing with uncertainties and ambiguities, conducting difficult conversations or managing the socio-political complexity in which transition projects are conducted. There is very little on how to build and develop successful global distributed teams or on facilitation techniques. Unfortunately, most project management training providers have not noticed that the world of project management is changing around them and still focus on technical project management knowledge such as how to use MS Project, which is widely available on the Internet.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT IS A MUSTHAVE SKILL FOR EVERY LEADER

What should we learn, if we want to become more competitive in the global job market? Focus should be given to the skills most Project Managers lack. The author’s experience has been confirmed in a study conducted in New Zealand, which is also reflected in Polish and European conditions. Probably not surprisingly, as much as 39% of respondents of the survey highlighted that leading change in their organisation is a top gap, while 34% identified difficult conversations and conflict management as missing key competences. Another 30% of research participants highlighted the importance of political ‘smarts’ and resolving 'grey' issues. And 27% responded that communication is still a challenge. Here I would like to draw attention specifically to the techniques of active listening and non-violent communication (NVC) used in agile and teal organisations. Talking about facts, emotions, feelings and requests is still a challenge in Poland mainly due to our tendency to take a judgemental position.

Since the world is rapidly changing and the future cannot be easily predicted, what we can do is to possess skills that are difficult to automate, but above all we must be agile. Agile is not a process or a methodology. It is a way of thinking, a philosophy of life – being supportive, trusting, open, honest and authentic. It is a willingness to change ourselves, to learn, and to be open to experiment and adaptation. It is not something you do. It is something you become. The agile state of mind is a mind shift. It requires that you let go of some of your current mind-set. Where does that agility mind-set come from? It comes from life, from the need to adapt and optimize ourselves to the constantly changing conditions under which we live and work. And all forms of life behave like this.

„It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” – Charles Darwin.

To succeed, you must switch off your inner autopilot, challenge your existing assumptions and beliefs, overcome your own discomfort, and reach a new level of agile thinking in how you adapt to the challenges of transition and transformation.

Agile PMO