In this lecture, we will explore Scenario 3 and the Individual Skills Management Matrix which is called job diversification. Our goal is to emphasize how you can enhance your employability by adding a new technical skill in a totally different area to your existing set of skills in your area expertise. Before studying a concrete example of job diversification, let's discuss the scenario more broadly. To begin, why would someone need to gain a new skill in a different area of expertise, and what would this other area be? To answer these questions, we need to go back to the analytics report published by Burning Glass Technologies, a job market research company based in Boston, Massachusetts. You may recall that, according to Burning Glass, in today's labor market, employers are seeking candidates with a combination of skills in which the main or core set of skills needs to be reinforced by adding supplementary skills in a different area of expertise. The Burning Glass analysis revealed that by coupling a field-specific core skillset with supplementary skills, job seekers can nearly double the number of jobs available for them. Moreover, the new jobs, which require a double set of skills, usually offer a sizable salary premium for successful applicants. In the career-related literature, the concept of having expertise in more than one area is often referred to as a pi-shaped model. This name is used because the Greek letter pi has two legs that are meant to represent two different areas of a job contender's expertise. The pi-shaped model is a rather new idea. The older but still widely used model is called the T-shaped model. The one-legged T-shaped model has long been used to represent a typical job seeker with one main area of expertise complemented by a range of non-job-specific or generic skills, such as communication skills, teamwork, leadership, cross-cultural, and other skills that are required on most jobs and help people move between jobs. As reported by Burning Glass, pi-shaped professionals are now in high demand and can enjoy significant salary premiums over T-shaped professionals. Fortunately, a traditional T-shaped skillset can be converted into a more advantageous pi-shaped one. In the Burning Glass reports, you can find examples of enhanced skillsets in many occupational areas, such as business and management, marketing, sales, data analysis, and IT to name a few. Take, for example, the occupational field of marketing. A typical skillset for a T-shaped specialist in this field would include core marketing skills, such as market research, product marketing, and product management plus some generic skills. This T-shaped skillset can be converted into a pi-shaped one if it is supplemented by a technical skill from another area, such as graphic design, communications, and social media, business analytics et cetera. In the modern economy, the pi-shaped model is becoming a norm. The company reports that fewer than 18 percent of all new job postings in the market require applicants to have core marketing expertise only, while 82 percent of postings call for complementary competencies in other vocational areas. As an example, there were six times fewer market research analyst jobs posted in 2013 than combined market and business management analysts jobs posted in the same period. The bottom line is that these days, gaining new skills in a different area of expertise is a necessity. But here's a question, how do individuals add new skills in an area which is outside their expertise? It could be a vicious cycle. To truly master a skill, you have to practice it on the job. But then, how can you get into the workplace without the skill? One of the strategies to get into a new field is to gradually deepen your IT skills. Take, for example, Maria's case that we explored in-depth in previous lectures. After Maria has mastered advanced Excel skills, she may further strengthen the IT component of her skills so she can get a position as a system accountant. With many responsibilities in the IT area, such as back-end mapping, troubleshooting, cleanup, backup, adding customized modules, and others. From the skills management perspective, job diversification is not much different from job enhancement. As you are now well-versed in the use of the Jafar model, you should be able to explain how Maria could approach the job diversification in her situation. In the second half of this lecture, we invite you to start afresh and work on a different case. For the purpose of illustration, we'll be using a new case study so you can see that the skills management tools and techniques that we describe in the course are not limited to the field of accounting or to just Maria. Once again, we asked a real person, someone in the field to help us prepare a realistic simulation for the course. Once again, the plan is to walk you through all the steps of the skills management process and explore how to accomplish additional tangible outcomes. In the exercise, we draw from the Burning Glass technology reports and utilize the Jafar model. To begin, we decided to focus on marketing as one of the vocational fields researched in the reports. Then we selected business analysis as a supplementary skill because this is one of the valuable add-ons recommended by researchers. According to Burning Glass, this combination of skills is frequently mentioned in contemporary job advertisements in the US. We think that the same logic can be applied to other areas and combinations of skills. After that, we identified some actual sample job descriptions by reviewing Monster and other recruiting websites, and professional publications. Specifically, we were looking for lower to middle level positions where both marketing and financial analysis or business analysis were required. To make sense of the findings, we consulted with an industry expert Mr. Gene Dichiara. Gene is a marketing instructor, online educator, course developer, consultant, and prior learning evaluator in the field of marketing and business management at the State University of New York's Empire State College. He also teaches self-marketing and self-management, a specialist course for adult learners and is very familiar with career development in the field of marketing. We asked Gene to think about his marketing students who are already in the profession and to come up with a realistic case study that we could use to test drive Jafar in the job diversification scenario. We're glad that Gene graciously and courageously agreed. So here's the story. Michael is an associate in the marketing department of a large organization. It manufactures and markets a variety of consumer packaged goods. He earned a BS in Marketing at a leading university, graduating at the top of his class. The principles and concepts of marketing he learned in college were put to good use in his present job. His current work experience provided him with additional insights, the marketing mix, consumer segmentation, customer relations, product development, marketing communications, and other relevant topics. Now, Michael has his eyes on a more advanced position namely that of marketing analyst. That position however requires skills that are beyond his current abilities. So, what additional skills does he need and how can Michael attain them? With Gene's assistance, we reviewed Michael's skills required for his current job and populated the Jafar skill manager template for this job. You may recall that to create a Jafar, the necessary ingredients include the three-tiered skillset model, The SIMPLE Critical Task Framework and the spreadsheet application, also, a lot of research to collect data. We assume that Michael has mastered his marketing and communications skills while in his previous and current jobs. In a sample Jafar that we created for his current marketing associate job, we can see relevant benchmarks. Benchmarking criteria, evidence of mastery, and assessment results. You can also see that Michael has been doing well in his jobs, as his skillset scores are high. Now, what happens if Michael would consider applying for a newly-posted position of a marketing analyst? Suppose that the main difference between his current and the newly-advertised position is the requirement to have well-developed business analytics skills. What would be his likely standing in the job competition? To find out, we will create a job-specific Jafar for the new position. To do so, we can simply transfer the data covering some of the required skills from his previous Jafar as they seem to fit the requirements for the new position nicely. As you would expect, the problematic area in the new Jafar is of course business analytics. The estimated total skillset score is a little low because of the zero sub-score for business analytics. The void is even more visible in the selection criteria statement. At the moment, Michael is not equipped to compete for this job. To be a viable candidate, he needs to develop a strategy to acquire the necessary skills in business analytics and prove that he has mastered them. You should consider learning about data analyses from multiple sources including business processes, statistical modeling, and finance.
