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Attracting Self-Learning Assets

April 3, 2015 - Building Automation

By Ken Sinclair

A continuing self-learning growth is the goal we all wish to achieve in our people assets and our company cultures because it is organic and natural but most of all sustainable.

Unreasonable Optimism? This video epitomizes the intent of a self-learning culture at the Chicago Collaboratory as Andy McMillan, the president of BACnet International, gives some priceless advice to a young bright mind trying to make sense of our industry.

I have many words written on the changes we need to make this happen. It all started with the realization that people are our only asset, which leads to my quick realization of our need as an industry to attract self-learning assets.

From this article comes the concept that as long as we can find folks willing to self-educate we can quickly backfill the tremendous need for good people in our industry: Knowledge Sharing to Drive Learning. If you can hire good people, train them well, and ensure they continue to learn throughout their career will we see industry, from the operators to the engineers, achieve the potential we all know is there.  - Brad White, P.Eng, MASc, Principal, SES Consulting, Inc.

So how do we attract people assets with their heads deep in autodidactism?

Our company online presence needs to contain an attractive, actually a seductive, self-learning piece so when the autodidactic folks, who we are looking for, find our great description of purpose and culture, they are attracted and want to join us to further their education while they earn a living.

As an industry we do a very bad job of this; our online presences often do not attract the desired autodidactic assets or possibly not our potential clients either.  Our potential clients are likely working on their continuing self-learning growth and what they want from our online presence self-learning piece is the same.

We need to clearly and precisely depict our IoT play and our ease of learning so both people asset and clients want to join us and become part of our learning machine and culture.

They need to answer:  How are you able to make our self-learning systems better?   It is everyone’s task if they are to be part of a self-learning company. They are the corporate assets, remember.  They need to grow and provide us dividends; if they are not increasing the value of a self-learning company while increasing their value then these frozen assets need to be released or unfrozen.

Part 2: Managing Our People As Assets

posted on 4/3/2015