In its most basic form, a marketplace is a process of buying and selling goods or services. Today, you should think about talent as a marketplace, like Amazon or eBay. The same problem that led to the need to invent money also exists today in the talent marketplace. The talent marketplace is not based on the exchange of goods or money, rather it is based on the development and exchange of competencies.
To understand this better, think about money. Money was invented about 40,000 years ago because trading didn’t always work. Say one farmer had a cow and another farmer had wheat. This trade worked if the farmer who had the cow wanted wheat, and the farmer who had the wheat wanted a cow. If neither wanted what the other farmer had, trading didn’t really work. The invention of money fixed this. This is because once everyone agreed on a common currency, the farmer could sell the cow for an agreed-upon price to whoever wanted a cow. Now this farmer could use this money to buy whatever they wanted.
In the Talent Marketplace today, there are 3 major players:
Individual Talent: These are people who need help developing their competencies or have competencies they want to sell.
Talent Developers: These are organizations and individuals who support individuals in developing their competencies through certified, non-certified and informal learning.
Talent Seekers: These are organizations who require competencies to complete a job. Most often they will pay the individual talent for their competency (a job), but sometimes the individual talent will complete this job for free (volunteering).
How the talent marketplace works:
Talent seekers define the competencies they need to complete a job. There are 155,000 commercial, social and public organizations who require talent to function.
Individual talent who have these competencies offer them to talent seekers for a negotiated price. The value is defined by supply and demand. The higher the demand, and the lower the supply, the higher the price. There are over 1.4M individuals who possess talent.
Individual talent who do not have the competencies in demand will seek the support of talent developers to help them develop these competencies. There are over 8000 talent developers from kindergarten to universities, to sports clubs, social organizations, art classes and libraries.
Talent developers will then collaborate with talent seekers to ensure they are developing competencies that are anticipated to be in demand in the future.
Without a common currency, Calgary’s talent marketplace is missing opportunities.
For example…
A talent seeker may be seeking to acquire competencies related to communications.
A talent developer, such as a university, may claim their programs develop competencies related to communications.
Finally, an individual may claim to possess competencies related to communications.
However, a big problem emerges when all three partners realize they define communication competencies differently.
THE IMPLICATIONS OF THIS ARE BIG.
First, talent seekers have difficulty acquiring the exact competencies they need. This will impact their ability to compete in today’s super competitive marketplace. Next, both the talent developers and individuals may be investing their time and money developing the wrong type of competencies. The problems caused by this mismatch will only increase as the pace of change increases.
As a city, we need a plan to continuously develop our competencies better and faster than any other. To start, we need to align on the important enabling competencies and just as important, we need to agree on what we call them.
To deal with this problem, we spent the past two years developing the Competencies for Life. The Competencies for Life are an integrated set of 25 enabling competencies anchored in six clusters.
The six clusters and competencies within each cluster include:
Problem Solving: Analytical Thinking, Creativity, Curiosity, and System Thinking
Self-Reliance: Adaptable, Determination, and Takes Initiative
Collaboration: Emotional Intelligence, Conflict Management, Inspire and Lead Others, Trusted, and Value Relationships.
Communications: Active Listening, Effective Verbal Communications, and Effective Writer
Core Literacies: Reading Literacy, Good with Numbers, Financial Literacy, Civic Literacy, and Technology Literacy
Core Workplace Skills: Define Workplace Goals, Manage People and Money, Professional Identity, Time Management, and Continuous Learning
Through this pilot project, we bring attention to the Talent Marketplace where Talent Developer and Talent Seeker partners work together to help Individual Talent map their professional path. Through research of the Talent Marketplace and evidence from major enabling competency models, our team of post-secondary students, David Finch and partners at Calgary Economic Development have created a robust library of tools and resources to help support our audiences in developing these competencies.
It is our hope that through this model, we can shape the growth of the talent marketplace in the new economy and make Calgary a hub for talent. To learn more about this project and the Competencies for Life model, please visit www.competenciesforlife.ca.
