Introduction
For a Renewed Approach to Skills Management
Why write a book on skills management, when the concept has been a part of managerial practices for the last 20 years?
Even if the time for epitaph-like assessments has not yet come, it is, however, necessary to propose an update on the subject. The 2000s saw the stabilization of the concept and could have led someone to believe, under the influence of the neo-institutionalist current, that the generalization of the skills approach would conclude with a standardization of the definition and practices.
However, 20 years later, this is not the case. Not only has skills management not fallen into oblivion, but its renewal presents both a theoretical and a practical challenge. First of all, theoretical, to the extent that new associated concepts have emerged, with key or critical skills, or even inter-organizational skills. Second, practical, as these skills are now declining according to singular types of populations and must be translated into each context of collective action. What is left of "the" competence? How should we rethink this approach when traditional business models and boundaries become fragmented, as the adaptability of individuals becomes a new social norm?
This is the ambition of this book.
It is important to remember at this point some fundamentals.
Skills management brings together two distinct worlds: the jobs that characterize the company organization, and the people who will occupy them. In the first place, skills management offers a common language to describe what is expected to fill the positions and what people can bring (Roger 2004).
Some authors, on the basis of the American works of Spencer and Spencer (1993), have defined skills as the fundamental characteristics of individuals, which lead them to obtain or to improve their performance at work based on precise criteria. At first sight, we traditionally make a distinction between knowledge and skills. Other, more numerous, characteristics are profound, difficult to identify and develop, such as personality traits, self-concept and motives. Thus, for Defélix (2003), skills are "a combination of resources, in a given situation, making it possible to.". This generic definition applies to an individual as well as to a group of employees (collective skill) or to an enterprise (key or strategic skill) (Retour 2005). The concept of a combination of resources is open: data or information, instruments, decision support systems, organizational routines, knowledge or know-how, attitudes, social skills, even cultural elements, and so on. Thus, skills are always localized: it depends on a given situation, a more or less favorable context, with temporal room for maneuver that is also more or less flexible (Le Boulaire & Retour 2008).
Skills management, as it exists, is the result of a progression of steps of alternating business practices and research (Gilbert, 2011). In the 1960s and 1970s, various "precursors" such as ACUCES in France or McClelland in the USA outlined what was not yet known as "management skills". In the UK, the first qualification standards appeared with "National Vocational Qualifications" and directly linked skills to national enforceable standards (Van Beirendonck 2004). It was with the "precursors" of the 1980s, such as Sollac or IBM, that formalized systems were put in place in the business sector (Roger 2004). Researchers such as Zarifian (1988) then analyzed "the emergence of the competence model" in relation to the evolution of work organization models and workforce management.
It was during the 1990s that this model rapidly took off and thus found its place within human resources management, mainly in connection with the need for management planning and the development of new skills to cope with market and technology developments in an increasingly competitive and volatile environment. In the USA, skills have been attached to Barney's (1991) resource-based view (RBV) and strategic management to gain a competitive advantage. In this effort to link skills and individual performance, we will talk about "competence", which is defined as a characteristic of an individual that produces effective or superior performance in a given function (Boyatzis 1982), and which will eventually lead to the notion of "distinctive competence". Prahalad and Hamel (1990) extend this area to that of organizational skills.
The 2000s were characterized by a standardization phase, with a generalization of discourse in both professional and academic environments. Most of the human resources management information systems (HRIS) propose a "skills" module. It is at this time that AFNOR created a standard for defining competence1, while in France, an operational directory of trades and jobs, called the Répertoire opérationnel des métiers et des emplois (ROME) was established, which identifies trades from common basic skills to a set of activities, analyzes the proximities between trades and proposes possible paths. Skills then became an object of certification in the 2000 version of the ISO 9000 standards.
This expansion of the competence approach has been sustainable, because it has enabled companies to respond in a flexible manner to the transformation of their more complex organizational structures, often adopting matrix configurations or project management. It has thus often taken precedence over the concept of position, which is more rigid and more technical.
We now see the organizations reconfiguring themselves towards more flexibility, adaptive requirements, with certainly less rigid, but also more local, fragmentary, biodegradable models. Consequently, skills management is no longer the key element of cross-disciplinary structures. Today, it is closer to small teams, professional logic and emerging professions.
That is why skills management cannot be developed in an organization without taking into account its culture and context. While some authors consider that the establishment of standards requires a relatively stable environment, which does not question too quickly the developed tools, others on the contrary consider that they are more suitable for uncertain environments. However, because it lasted for 20 years, skills management is no longer a fashion trend; neither is it a magic wand which could miraculously solve all problems. Its implementation will not be without difficulties, both at the level of the tools that it must define and support, and at the level of its appropriation by the company operators.
This book consists of six chapters grouped into two parts and concludes with an overall reflection on flexibility.
The first part includes three chapters. Chapter 1 recalls the basics of the notion of competence and the value of a mentoring process for transferring skills. The following two chapters show the importance, alongside technical skills, of human and emotional skills.
In the first chapter, Manel Dardouri shows that skills development is at the heart of the mentoring relationship. What are the different approaches to the notion of competence? To what extent can mentoring support the transfer of skills, the sharing of experiences and the learning of new knowledge? How does this assistance and learning relationship contribute to the development of individual skills and the emergence of collective skills within the company? These are the questions that are addressed in this introductory chapter of the book.
Manel Dardouri is a PhD student in Management Sciences at the Ecole Doctorale de Sciences Economiques et de Gestion de l'Université de Lyon. Her research focuses on the contributions of support methods, particularly mentoring, on career management and the development of individual and reflexive skills.
Alain Roger then questions in Chapter 2 the people skills of engineers. Engineering training is usually focused on the acquisition of general or specialized technical skills, but it also takes increasingly into account people skills. The objective of this chapter is to identify the dimensions of these people skills, which in the literature are considered as "soft skills", compared to "hard skills", which are related to the technical specialization of the profession.
Alain Roger, Professor Emeritus at Jean Moulin University Lyon 3, was Head of the Magellan Research Center of this university for five years and of the Human Resources research group of this center for several years. After obtaining a PhD from Northwestern University in the USA, and business experience at Merlin Gerin, he was heavily placed in France in the operation of IAE in Aix-en-Provence, then in Lyon by taking, in particular, responsibility of Master programs in HRM and by actively participating in professional associations such as AGRH and Référence RH.
Hélène Monier addresses in Chapter 3 the emotional component of the work that is fundamentally integrated in the current theme of psychosocial risk prevention and individuals' ability to manage risks, specifically how they must master and shape their own emotions in particular in order to master and shape those felt by the people with whom they interact with in their work. The emotional skills that they must develop are studied in the case of police officers of the French anti-crime squad (Brigade anticriminalité - BAC).
Hélène Monier holds a PhD in Management Science, is a Temporary Lecturer of Teaching and Research at the Jean Moulin University Lyon 3, IAE Lyon, and is associated with the Magellan Research Center. She is also a National Police Research Associate at the Research...
