What are your Core Competencies?
At the moment I’m far too busy to get a chance to blog, this is just a fast note before falling into bed for a short night’s sleep and off to work again in the morning. I’ve spent the last few nights writing an application for the job I’m currently doing most days - contract web developer - in a public sector organisation (I’m freelancing as well, and uni is going back next week for my last ever unit of the Bachelor of Computing, yay!!! I got 80%, a High Distinction, for KXT301 Software Engineering Project A).
Addressing the selection criteria for this job application, I’m led to the question: what are my core competencies? Even better, what are your core competencies?
I’d say my core competencies, what I’m really selling, boils down to the following. I specialise in web standards best practice web design and development. I create XHTML and CSS layouts as a specialist. That is my first and foremost skill set. What I also offer is an understanding of accessibility best practice and a whole bunch of usability and interface design knowledge. Although my interest is really not just in the technical implementation of interfaces as much as it is in the science behind interaction design and especially context driven interfaces. I’m a big picture guy and that can be handy.
My core competency then is that I’m a standardista front end specialist. That’s what I’m selling. The rest is cream on the cake - an interest in databases, business marketing, management theory, programming and web technologies, design and particularly interaction design theory, and all of that mega-tome of learned industry knowledge that’s crawling around in my head. I bring into an organisation the fresh insight gleaned from a thousand contemporary blogs and discussions and hand it over in a walking resource. How do you find out about X - I tend to have the resource if not the answer for your question.
This is what defines expertise. While many people develop a specialisation, or a small set of core competencies, its something larger to realise that you have that expertise. In fact, given the opportunity, I could dramatically improve the public sector web development game in this State. That’s not arrogance. And I know many people who are probably a lot better than me, so I’m way short of being the smartest guy on the block. I find what’s lacking in projects is usually that solid core knowledge, rather than high level implementation, too. Teams need to actually get graceful degradation, for example, and separation of content from presentation. Fundamental principles of good design. While we take that for granted as a simple set of concepts, its not so in real project land when you walk into a new team.
People are working really hard at trying to undersand but its busy in the trenches, too busy to research and spend weeks trolling specifications on HTML whatever. Often the good intention is there but a lack of expertise in the team limits their ability to achieve the highest results on this iteration. Its all about a learning curve, not black and white standardista outcomes. Its up to specialists like ourselves to push the envelope that little bit further on every project. A new idea here and there and the occasional best practice trick. And understand that we can’t redirect the team in one day. A little bit of new information pattering over the team on a daily basis can significantly contribute to the organisation’s knowledge over even a relatively short time span. Show team members the occasional resource, a book or a tutorial as new problems arise.
So what are your core competencies? What are you really selling? Personality? Skill? Or you might be walking in with the value proposition that hiring you will save that organisation significant dollars over the next 3 - 12 months? I’d be interested to know.
By the way, I’m trying to implement a greater ratio of simple web standards tutorials for very basic stuff. You might have noticed, right? Often, I notice there are huge resources about advanced practices and barely nothing reliable about the basic principles and practices. I’m hoping to address that imbalance.
