Learning, competencies, employee development

Gaining people awareness to KM is an organizational key success factor. Blending other KM disciplines with learning and training programs is a real challenge. To transform learning and training into employee competence is an art. KM may help companies cultivate this unique capacity

Knowledge management is not only sharing documents or combining databases. Its real value is in sharing ideas and insights that are not documented and hard to articulate: tacit knowledge.

Sharing tacit knowledge requires interaction among people. This is another argument to define knowledge as action.

The competitive environment of the new millennium is characterized by substantial and discontinuous change. In this new landscape, managers must be able to balance both stable and fluid states of the organization. In other words, they need to be more flexible and entrepreneurs and organizations must help them and train them to survive in cross border business environment by finding and applying new business solutions rapidly.

Employee competence is the capabilities of the people within an organization. It is frequently named "knowledge in action".

  • employee competence grows when more people know more that is useful to the organization and the organization uses more of what people know.

The company should create an environment where people willingly transfer tacit knowledge and improving trust among people.

  • as employee competence grows, there is better performance, more innovation, a higher concentration of skills in what's important, and more people working in areas critical for organizational success.
  • Employee competence helps the firm to create external and internal structure. It is the basis of the learning organization. This type of organization described by Peter Senge is a flexible organization which focuses on knowledge transfer and learning between all the firm's members.

Competitive advantage increasingly depends upon experimentation, the continuous exploration of opportunity. This experimentation requires generative learning (involving recreating the world) than adaptive learning (accepting the world as it is).

Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we re-perceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life.

Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline, 1990

Schlumberger

Beginning in 1998, Schlumberger launched an ambitious initiative, with the objective to transform personnel management in Schlumberger by bringing interactivity, speed and flexibility to the personnel systems used by both employees and managers. The project vision was to foster an open and stimulating environment in which employees are empowered with tools and information that will help them maximize their career potential with the organization.

PeopleMATCH facilitates the matching of employees' life aspirations with career opportunities and present and future business needs. As a Web-based tool used by Managers and Personnel Managers, PeopleMATCH contains information concerning vacant positions and information about employees. The employee information can be queried to identify candidates for vacant positions. A threaded discussion functionality is linked to each vacant position allowing Managers and Personnel Managers

to communicate information about potential candidates to one another. This forum for electronic discussion facilitates a rapid and high-quality communication interchange concerning the vacant positions and potential internal candidate