Column - Attracting Self-Learning Assets

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.

Who knew there was an ISO standard for managing our people as assets? What is Asset Management? Assets, and value realized from them, are the basis for any organisation delivering what it aims to do. Whether public or private sector, and whether the assets are physical, financial, human or 'intangible', it is good asset management that maximises value-for-money and satisfaction of stakeholders expectations. It involves the coordinated and optimized planning, asset selection, acquisition/development, utilization, care (maintenance) and ultimate disposal or renewal of the appropriate assets and asset systems source.

This likely starts under the "About” tab, with a mission statement or a compass page for our company that quickly defines: who we are, why we are here, our environmental beliefs, and business values.

This is a great example of the direction we need to go: What Does It Mean To Be A System Integrator: My belief is that to be a truly successful integrator you have to master talent management; attraction, retention and development, and you have to build expertise in organizational development. - Paul Oswald, President, Environmental Systems, Inc. (ESI)

Also from the April edition of AutomatedBuildings.com: Self-Learning Knowledge Sharing Platforms: How internal company Wikipedia and other virtual knowledge sharing platforms allows Creating Self-Learning Cultures which attracts self-learning assets. In this review, I am virtually working to better understand the evolving self-learning knowledge sharing platforms and learning system of a young consulting company as their newest employee. It covers how internal company Wikipedia and other virtual knowledge sharing platforms allows creating self-learning cultures which attracts self-learning assets.

I am hoping that I can learn to think younger, learn to try to think like them. In this review are some of my first thoughts about this journey.

Here is more linkage to the kind of thinking that brought me to this conclusion:

Creating Self-Learning Cultures. How do we create them? How do we use them to increase the value of our only assets our people?

The February editorial was Growing Our Only Asset: Our People: How do we motivate them to be Curious, Passionate. It generated lots of interest and comments from the industry, much of which was captured on social media.

Please join me on my crusade to help our industry attract more self-learning assets to build our industry stronger and younger.

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