Selling yourself?

HOW marketable are you? If you decide to leave your present job, for whatever reason, are you sure of getting another, comparable or perhaps better job at the end of your notice time?

If the answer is an unequivocal `No!' then your marketability index is less than one and alarm bells should start to ring!

The MI, your marketability index tells you how you are perceived in the market.

Compensation mismatch

If you wonder why your MI score is so poor, the answer is simple. Many of us are overpaid because our personal productivity has consistently under-performed against the compensation we receive! For instance, in 1981 an IIT & IIM graduate typically received Rs 13000 per year as a gross salary. By 2001, the emolument for a similar entry-level profile was around Rs 700,000/-! Compensations rocketed up 53 times over the figure twenty years ago! Even after accounting for a compounded inflation rate of 13%, per year salaries have still gone up 43 times in actual, palpable terms!

On the sobering side, personal productivity of the fresh entrant may have increased by half or 50% at the outside most!

The conclusion is self-evident; we are incredibly over-priced, probably over-valued and under-used! Your MI, which is wholly dependent on these three factors, will have taken a nosedive into the oblivion of chasmic chaos!

Professional productivity

The only way to improve your MI is to jack up the productivity angle. This can only be done on the job. Most of us already spend over 12 hours at work, quite possibly what we can, quite easily do in less than half the time!

Spending more time on the job is pathologically pointless since it is unproductive, non compos mentis and does not achieve the desired objective anyway! As Andy Grove, former Chairman of Intel Corp puts it:

"The more direct way of increasing productivity is doing the same thing in less time - turning things around faster"

The actual answer lies in changing the way we make decisions:

Use contemporary ideas and practices. Ask the best way of doing things rather than do it the way you've always been doing them

Have a mind open enough to admit new knowledge, don't waste time reinventing the wheel of someone else's making just because its not your own way. Past experience is good, but should not be sacrosanct!

Unlearn what you know from your past and relearn new skills and competencies.

As adults we are unfortunately not very motivated to learn - to progress for instance, from the known to the unknown without a strong mentoring system.

Peter Drucker, the management messiah observes that, "In terms of actual work on knowledge worker productivity we are, in the year 2000, roughly where we were in the year 1900, with regard to the productivity of the manual worker!" According to Drucker labour productivity went up 50 times during the 20th century mainly because of the extraordinary research that went into improving labour productivity during this period.

The only way to increase productivity is through continuous learning.

To do that, you need to be able to make use of the knowledge explosion. Adopt and adapt to new knowledge.

The three dimensions of professional productivity

The first step in productivity enhancement is to recognise all the three dimensions of productivity-- technology, networking and knowledge, then work on enhancing our abilities it in each of these areas. This can be done by:

Connecting knowledge to work - learning the best practices and latest management principles

Leveraging the power of peer networks - learning from Other Peoples' Experience (OPE) and avoid reinventing the wheel

Put CID (Communications, Internet, Desktop) technology to work for you - automate your routine work so that you have time for the bigger issues. The future belongs to those who invest in themselves. And if you think knowledge is expensive, try ignorance!

T MURALIDHARAN

CEO, C&K Management Ltd

murali.hyd@cnkonline.com