Advanced Competence — key to digitalisation

We understand Advanced Competence as the ability of both — employees and companies — to engage in self-organised action in the process of digitalising the economy and society.

Action Systems

It is more important than ever that people in companies have to deal with tasks that change quickly, are uncertain, complex and contradictory. More than ever before, employees must acquire the necessary knowledge themselves in the process of working. To do this, they communicate independently with colleagues from other organisations of the company and in other places. Together, they find approaches which seem appropriate to individualized problems and they try to solve these problems in a self-determined manner.

People in business

Specialists and managers are increasingly challenged to do something that has been imagined so far for the process of producing goods and services by digital networking in business and society: to organize themselves.

Company for people 

In the new working world, it is important for companies not only to adapt to a digitalised production, but also to promote and develop the self-organised actions of their employees.

Work place as a criterion

Competences do not develop somehow and they do not prove themselves somewhere. In companies there is a place for both: the workplace. The development of personnel must therefore take place where the tasks actually arise in companies and can be successfully mastered.

Competence is the best qualification

In the digital age, many certainties from analogue working environments are evaporating. The professional qualifications required for the digital working world are difficult to predict. And when you see them, they are unreliable: They are constantly changing. You don’t get very far in the digital world of work with cumbersome, well-regulated training regulations and long-term studies. The only qualification that really helps here is the individual competence of employees.

Individual competence is part of the organizational structure

Companies can react in two ways to the increasing de-standardization of tasks and the creeping devaluation of employees’ professional qualifications. One is by agile project management. On the other hand, by promoting the individual competence of their employees. And in the digital age, both play a structural role in the organisation. And in the digital age, both play a structural role in the organisation.

Competence and organizational development converge

In the digital age, employee skills development is neither an apparent alternative nor a mere addition to traditional organizational development. The fact that agile organisations today follow their employees and these in turn follow their flexible tasks means developing the competence of people: developing organizations. If one changes the perspective, the same thing becomes apparent: Organisations can also be developed by developing the competencies of employees.

Embedding competence in corporate development

The competence development of employees is not only embedded in organisational development, but also in corporate development. By Advanced Competence, both — employees incompanies and organisational structures forcompanies — reach a completely new level in their ability forcompanies to not only passively adapt to the digital structural change in economy and society, but to actively and successfully help to design it bycompanies. Once again, a top-down perspective shows the same thing: In the process of the digital transformation of economy and society, it is the corporate goals from which the organizational structures are derived, which in turn determine the competencies of employees to be developed.