3. How do labour competency and competitiveness relate?

The movement towards the adoption of the labour competency approach has been related to the hanges that are currently taking place globally in different environments. Mertens,(1) in particular, has associated labour competencies with the generation of competitive advantages, the productivity strategy and the management of human resources.

This author considers that the emergence of the competencies approach is undoubtedly related to the productive transformations that have taken place since the eighties. A greater exposure to global competency and the pressure to improve quality and reduce costs were strategies that spread quickly from Japan to the Western world.

Enterprises have quickly come to understand the need to prevail in the market by creating competitive advantages; to Mertens, the following question summarises the whole issue: how can enterprises differentiate in a market that tends to globalise and to facilitate the quick and massive spreading of better organisational practices and technological improvements?

The entrepreneurial strategies that aimed at improving competitiveness ended up producing differentiation elements from the organisational structure and from including elements that used to be only part of their environment. In this way cooperation networks were built between the productive function and other key agents such as suppliers, advisors, contractors, customers, workers, etc. Actual virtual structures were created and the important things were not the physical or financial assets but rather other intangible and valuable ones, such as knowledge, training, innovation capacity, market management, motivation systems, etc.

One of the key components of this newborn architecture is the human factor, i.e. the contribution made by people and supporters of the organisation in favour of the enterprise’s objectives. In that sense, it can be concluded that the emergence of the approach on labour competency is related to the strategy of competitiveness, given the enterprise’s need to take the development of its human resources as the starting point to differentiate in the market.

Nowadays, the relationship between a competent workforce and the degree of competitiveness and productivity of a country are widely accepted. There are a number of diagnoses associated with the little availability of competencies and the degree of productivity of economy. Examples of this are the national diagnoses on education and training that supported the projects to transform education in Chile and Mexico.(2)

For instance, an experience that illustrates the relationship between productivity and competencies development in Latin America may be quoted. We are referring to the System for the Measurement and Improvement of Productivity (SIMAPRO), whose main principle begins with accepting the fact that modifying workers’ performance influences productivity indicators.(3) Performance is part of a broader concept, that of behaviour, and the intention is to work towards the identification of the factors that affect performance in order to correct them through actions that have been particularly designed and directed with that aim. A fundamental aspect is the definition of indicators of the organisation’s productivity.

SIMAPRO’s basic methodological principles are:

it is limited to those dimensions of productivity that the personnel can control;
it considers the measurement of the objectives that correspond to the functions fulfilled by the personnel;
the interaction among different indicators may be appreciated, rather than only an isolated one;
an aggregated indicator is created in order for it to measure the progress in personnel performance;
indicators are dynamic, fluctuating and changing; new ones may appear or some may no longer be used;
the model must be simple and comprehensible.

 

 

 

 

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1 Mertens, Leonard, Labour competence: emergence, analytical frameworks and institutional models, Montevideo, Cinterfor/ILO, 1997. Available at www.oitcinterfor.org/publicaciones
2 Available at the World Bank Web page: www.worldbank.org
3 All the information concerning SIMAPRO was included in: Mertens, Leonard, Productivity in organisations, Montevideo, Cinterfor/ILO, 2004: http://www.oitcinterfor.org/public/english/region/ampro/cinterfor/publ/mert_pro/index.htm

 

 

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