Identifying and Utilizing Competence in Expert Organizations

Within recent years, there has been discussions on the lack of competence and lack of competent applicants to support the growth of businesses especially in Finland. Companies are reporting increasing amounts of employment mismatch which is seen hindering growth and innovation. The importance of competence is largely recognized but how much and to what extent companies do know about their existing competence resource? The goal of this study is to examine how organizations identify and assess competence and find ways to improve the utilization of the existing competence resources. The focus is on knowledge intensive expert organizations and a total of seven organizations were interviewed for this study in the fall of 2019. The results indicated that organizations already possess a good set of competence related tools and practices. However, in order to gain full advantage of the existing resource a holistic viewpoint to competence as a strategic asset and competence management should be attained. This would likely increase the quality of actions and information related to existing competence. Better understanding of the existing competence resource would lead to more informed decision-making enabling more strategic approach to competence management. In the future technology is likely to change the existing practices in competence management and provide more comprehensive tools for strategic decision making