Beyond the three-month rule

In most employment cultures there seems to be an informal “three-month” rule.

That is that after three months the truths of a job and the employee’s suitability emerge.

Unfortunately, this can lead to confusion and pain, and only in the most enlightened of employment situations have honest and direct communications been established in the first 3 months.

The art of job matching is not precise and rarely able to be authenticated in a satisfactory way on facts alone.

Many career planning or organisation process authors seek to place learning and professional development in the sequence of events that constitute human capital development.

A significant error is commonly made in assuming at the time of recruitment that a candidate or prospective employee has undertaken learning that makes them fully competent for the job as described. This question is often expressed as “qualifications” or “degree in a related discipline required”.

Sometimes, though rarely, the specific qualification maps directly to the specific skills required.

Of course, the other great assumption is that the employer has accurately described the job or tasks required to be done. Most employers are seeking a type of person, with appropriate professional skills and attributes.

No amount of screening and multi-factor personality profiling, can overcome the propensity for Job Specifications and Resume’s to be significantly inaccurate predictors of future behaviours and job activities.

It must much more healthy to assume that both the job and the learning required to ensure the skills are up to date, evolve during the post-employment processes. I have described this model as a Career Helix because I think in healthy employment circumstances this is indeed cyclical.

In our gig and soon to be post-virus economies, employment, productivity and patience are going to be needed especially as their will likely be more people returning to multiple employers or employment sites.

Good learning systems account for all forms of learning including formal and informal as well as research-based and competency. The important news for the future is that less and less institutional and programmed learning is required as learning becomes granular and search based. The key role of Learning Institutions will be assessment and certification, and much less training delivery.

Having said that it is a key role of Learning institutions to continue to undertake and publish research. But the resultant learning should be freely available. Just as Tim Berners Lee intended when he devised the World Wide Web.

Mark Keough is an Australian-based consultant in Learning Recognition systems. He was the founding Vice President for US-based Monster Learning at Monster.com in the early 2000s and holds a professional Doctorate in Learning Communications. He is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at Flinders University