From this month’s HR News and Views:

Part I: The knowledge worker of today; the new capitalist!

The biggest challenge for knowledge workers; a word first coined by Peter Drucker is to stay relevant. Knowledge, unlike skills makes itself obsolete and changes very rapidly.

The knowledge we start with when starting our careers is not adequate for a fifty years work span! It will become increasingly important to reinvent ourselves, find ways of staying relevant, keeping our interests and energies high and continuing to be effective. As Drucker says, “If you haven’t learned how to learn, you’ll have a hard time. Knowing how to learn is partly curiosity. But it’s also a discipline.”

The following guidelines are some of the ways in which he believes Knowledge workers can continue to be effective executives; a characteristic that is very learnable.

“I have not come across a single ‘natural’: an executive who was born effective. All the effective ones had to learn how to be effective. And all of them then had to practice effectiveness until it became a habit. Effectiveness can be learned – and also it has to be learned.”

To read the complete issue, click
here