Meet Pericles.

I am a HR Manager in a business development consulting for SMEs. We are a distributed organisation operating  in a number of regions across Greece, providing support to overcome significant demand stagnation in local markets. Unemployment is high, especially long-term one, and among young adults. The labour force is characterised by low self-confidence, low trust and creativity and a limited capacity for collaborative work.

I need to overcome the difficulties of a stagnant labour market to support quick expansion of my company across the country. This requires fast-track development of our senior and junior consultants, through informal recognition embedded in self- and peer-assessment practices,  as well as identifying and referring to formal recognition frameworks, in order to encourage the formation of professional development pathways. While initially targeting our consultants this approach would be transferred to their client SMEs, establishing an internally incubated approach for complementary professional development and business innovation practice.

What should Pericles consider?

What's the objective?

  • Recruit staff
  • Encourage self-reflection, self-assessment and peer assessment of professional development
  • Encourage networking and collaborating, systematically deploying continuous assessment practice when providing consulting to their clients.
  • Focusing on human capital development and adaptability for the reorganisation of the SMEs and the development and market positioning of their new products and / or services to address ever changing demand, 
  • Enhancing their innovation together with their capacity to overcome labour market frictions and easily recruiting people with totally different experience and skills’ profiles.

Who will have access?

  • Colleagues (consultants) and peers, managers in the SMEs, people outside the company, the consultant/employee/trainee after ending the relationship with the company
  • Should the Company offer tools for issuing credentials and tools to relate self- and peer (open) recognition to formal recognition frameworks?

Who will be able to claim recognition?

  • Should and how consultants claim their own skills?
  • Should peers and/or managers in the SMEs endorse or recognise skills?
  • Are there widely accepted and comprehensive skills taxonomies that can be used?

What will be recognised?

  • Practices and competencies acquired through work
  • Continuing professional development
  • Transfer of company’s practices to their clients —and conversely

Pericles's Path

Starting out

  • Structuring a user-centred repository of of informal recognition patterns and adopt and recommend a trustable and extendable (open) “Digital Credential” format, eg. “Blockcerts” or “Open Badge” or …
  • Developing a repository of formal recognition frameworks, especially related to transversal skills’ development and consulting skills recognition, providing with access to all and with connected self-customised (informal) recognition (assessment) tools
  • Inviting interested job seekers to run self assessment tools and also make them familiar with issuing light credentials towards organiations, occupations or functions (e.g. like, endorsement, light comment)
  • Engaging recruits to join seniors’ groups and adopt customizable peer recognition credentials, working with innovative ideas and business development solutions
  • Adopting, at management level, updated sets of occupation profiles and corresponding competence assessment and recognition frameworks, to be deployed both in boosting innovation and self-assessment competence among company’ s consultants as well as among managers and employees of the client SMEs

consolidating

  • Gradually increasing participation to the networking scheme, with dynamic clustering and flourishing digital credential templates/formats
  • Ever increasing and enriching repository of self- and peer recognition patterns and practices

Extending

  • Establishing “good practice” in the business consulting ecosystem
  • Becoming a de-facto standard for job matching and recruiting and sustainable human capital development in clusters of SMEs, across Greek and other European regions
  • Increasing face value of formal recognition and accreditation processes through rationalising the demand for formal credentials in the labour market and social inclusion services

Technology checklist

  • Social networks
  • Portable, verifiable, lightweight recognition bits: Open Badges, Bit of Trust
  • Completed profiles are exportable as PDF, Word, Excel or XML files.
  • Verifiable issuer profile and context
  • Credential reader and verifier

What do they think?

It’s great for supporting innovation,  equal opportunities and valorisation of each person’s skills while meeting the need of the market.
This new approach of recognition of informal learning had an impact on our usual way of working and are a little unsure if this is worth the effort, but are aware that a lot of candidates rarely get picked and hope this system can help them overcome this.