Page 232 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

keeping up with the phoneses � 211

` metAskIlls Are the key to suCCess
In the mIdst oF ChAnge

Metaskills “transcend any particular job, task, or career.” Six of them,
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for example, which can help to prepare people for careers that seem,
these days, to be continually reinvented over one’s lifetime, were
identified by coauthor Michael Kroth and McKay Christensen in
their book Career Development Basics: adaptability, learning to learn,
the ability to anticipate, creating, problem solving, and interacting.
Metaskills are used when everything else—mobile technology, for
example—changes around you. They can include knowing—by
autonomous learners—how to “access, glean, select, review, and
integrate” content into their personal knowledge. They can link what
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people learn to real problem solving.
These are the kind of metaskills that will also serve mobile workers
well. In addition to training your deployed workers in the immediate
content—facts, how-tos, latest updates—you need consider develop-
ing their meta-competencies, which will have longer-term payoffs.
Organizations develop core competencies, which are sources of
sustainable competitive advantage. Smart organizations develop
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those employee metaskills, or meta-competencies, that stand the test
of time. The ones your organization decides are strategic may be dif-
ferent from those of other organizations. At this point we’ll look at a
short list of competencies that we think are important for organiza-
tions that wish to adopt a mobile workforce strategy.

` metAskIll one: BeCome A leArnIng orgAnIzAtIon

LearnKey, Inc., is a Utah-based company founded by John Clemons
in 1987. The world of learning via VHS video was essentially jump-
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started by this company. Can you imagine hearing the news in 1992