The Skills for Career Mobility - Interview with Dennis Green

As the economy moves from a focus on resilience and survival to one on recovery and adaptation many of us will see the skills we need and how we apply them shifting. This goes beyond internal mobility to career mobility.

Career mobility is something that Dennis Green has thought a great deal about and has experienced in his own life.

In this interview he shares his experience and thoughts on how each of us can improve career mobility and support it in our communities.

Dennis is principal at South Arm Training in Delta BC and is contributing to the IEEE 1484.20.2 Defining Competencies Working Group.

Ibbaka: Tell us something about your background and how you came to do the work in competencies.

Dennis: My career has been mostly accidental which has been useful when I talk to people about career development and where they’re going. As a kid, I was exposed to a lot of different things and traveled a lot. We had the freedom to explore many things and new ideas. Music was something we always did as a family and I’ve played stringed instruments since I was five, moving from the classical world to rock music when I was a teenager.

I started cooking at home when I was eleven or twelve, because I had an interest in it and wanted to eat well. At one point, when my parents were picking chores us to do for the year, I suggested I cook breakfast every morning. That meant I got to dictate the menu and grab the cookbooks and that’s what led me into an interest in food.

At the end of high school in the mid-80’s, I was looking to earn money and not many places would hire a guy with hair down the middle of his back. A local restaurant in Kerrisdale was looking for someone to work weekend prep shifts. I really enjoyed the work and what I was doing. I had made the decision that a university path right after high school wasn’t really how I wanted to proceed. My part-time job turned into a full-time job, which then turned into an apprenticeship.

Working in a small restaurant, there might only be four or five people on the kitchen crew, so when someone left you moved up the chain. It doesn’t take long for you to move from an entry-level position into a senior position in an environment like that.

By the time I was 20, I was the chef and running the place. I did that for 20 years at different places in Vancouver, including Bishop’s, a restaurant some of you may know.

Working in small restaurants was great, but at some point you either buy a restaurant and do it for the rest of your life or go on to something else. A lot of people go into larger food service environments or teaching. I knew I was ready for a change, but not sure what.

Coincidently, I received an invitation to sit on a committee that was going to review the apprenticeship program for cooks in BC. I’d had my own frustrations with sending people to school and having instructors tell them that what we were doing in our shop was not the ways things were done. They often were taught only traditional, classic techniques, and the curriculum hadn’t kept up with changes to industry.

I thought it was a great opportunity to bring a new perspective to the table and participating in that committee turned into an opportunity to actually land a job at go2HR, BC’s tourism and hospitality HR association. That led me into the world of competency-based training and assessment.

I have a lot of passion for ensuring that skills people have can carry them from one place to another. I’ve experienced that in my own life and I see the work being done around competency-based frameworks and development as supporting that view of the world.

Ibbaka: You were leading a very high-end kitchen. How did those skills transfer into your work in consulting?

Dennis: I remember how I landed the job at go2HR. I was on the review committee, and the person who was originally hired to lead the project had realized it wasn’t a good fit shortly after they had started. I went to a committee meeting and the CEO of go2HR told us she needed to hire a consultant to keep the project going. I went to her after the meeting and recommended myself. She questioned my lack of experience as a business consultant, but I knew they wanted it to be driven by industry. I managed to convince her that what was going to be critical was knowing the restaurant business inside and out, understanding what it takes to be successful as a cook and chef, and knowing the right people to have at the table. She hired me to keep the project going on a short-term contract and about two months later I had a full time job that kept me busy for the next 12 years.

A lot of skills I didn’t know I had became evident to me when I transitioned into that environment. I hadn’t thought about them as tangible, transferable business skills, but there are things you do everyday when you are running a busy kitchen:

Project management – you have to plan the menus, organize functions, build production schedules, budgets, and order supplies, all while keeping everybody motivated and getting things done. That is always happening at a very rapid pace in a busy kitchen. Delays are measured in minutes, not in days or weeks.

Design thinking - you’ve got all of these ingredients, trying them, applying them, tasting them, changing them. You go through a process that people in software may call agile development but cooks just call it cooking and creating.

A friend once said that he has always been fascinated by restaurants because looking at a busy kitchen, he sees high-level, high-performing project management and production happening at lightning speed and on a continual basis.

Core business skills, like working with people, motivation, budgeting, managing deliverables and timelines are things I was able to bring to the table. You never think about those things until you actually put a different hat on and see how they apply.

Ibbaka: This is the whole idea of transferable skills, how do you extend that? How are you thinking about transferable skills today?

Dennis: I’m thinking a lot now about the idea that competency models need to be transferable and reusable. They need to help reinterpret someone’s skills in a different context in order to move people from occupation to occupation and role to role.

The thought process around distilling the basic elements of a skill and understanding what makes it transferable is often a question of context. The same skill can express itself differently in different contexts, as my project management skills have.

I had a friend who was building a new house and told me he was plastering the outside himself. He is a baker by trade, and I didn’t know he could do that kind of exterior building work. He said that plastering is the same as icing a cake. You need to know the consistency of the material and what makes it stick to the walls, but once you understand that, then the process of applying it and smoothing it is exactly the same as icing a cake, just on a larger scale. That’s always stuck with me, as often jobs can look quite different until you dig deeper into what the underlying skills are,

Ibbaka: What are some of the ways you see skill and competency models being used in the real world today?

Dennis: COVID-19 has really impacted industries that were sailing along at high-speed, like tourism, retail and hospitality. Transferability of skills between occupations is going to be more important than ever.

For those of us who have been working in sector-based workforce development for a long time, there has always been a focus on getting people into your industry sector and moving them up, generally in related occupations. If there isn’t going to be a lot of growth in those occupations for a number of years as those industries recover, what are you going to do with all of the people that have been displaced? They are going to go somewhere else for the short term. Do we make people start at the beginning again on a new career pathway, or do we move them across and give them a bridge into a different occupation that takes into account what they have already achieved. Cross-occupational mobility is going to be a really important part of skill and competency models for the next number of years.

Understanding how the world of work and job roles are evolving is another big question. In larger organizations, you have departments, functions, and job roles. People may move up that hierarchy, or they may see another opportunity in another department and move from A to B. Managers in those two departments may not actually be able to make meaningful comparisons if there is not a good system in place.

Another thing is what do we do about students entering the workforce for the very first time. Where are they going and what skills will they need? Especially if they are getting into emergent fields where the technology and pace of change in the workforce is faster than the training can ever keep up with. How do we give them those skills to adapt, learn, and move forward? Those are all important lenses for designing and applying skill and competency models.

Policy makers and the government are dealing with the big picture. Where are all the people we need to keep our economy growing for the next ten years? They need to understand how people, skills and competencies are interwoven so they can look at strategic policy decisions or investments in training.

You can’t grow an area that has a lot of promise that doesn’t have the workforce. We used to say that at go2HR all of the time – you can’t just keep on creating tourism products and inviting people to visit Canada if there aren’t enough people here to serve them. The workforce development strategy has to be a part of the growth strategy.

Ibbaka: How do you think the kinds of skills and competency models we are developing will need to change over the coming years?

Dennis: I’ve done a lot of work on competency standards that end up being very task-based. In some cases, that leads down the road that competencies get defined as the tasks being completed and not by the underlying nature of what that work really entails.

Going back to the kitchen analogy, we’ll quite often design skill and training models based on how to cook A, B, C and D. The reality is, you need to understand how foods interact with each other, how recipes and cooking methods work, and how to use the tools and equipment to turn ingredients into a finished product. What you prepare is secondary to that, and those same competencies are used in almost everything that you prepare.

Most cooking tasks depend on a few common competencies and skills. You can read a new recipe and learn how to make something else. This is the approach we need to take. We need to look at competencies and tasks independently and see how they connect. We also need to make sure we are not just defining a list of tasks and calling them competencies.

Ibbaka: The work you are leading for the IEEE 1484.20.2 Defining Competencies standard is around clustering. Can you give us an update on how you’re approaching that work?

Dennis: It has been fascinating to be involved with this group. There are so many perspectives from all around the world bringing different lenses to how we define skills and competencies.

There are two pieces to this whole equation – how do we define competencies in a way that they’re going to be purposeful and reusable across different contexts and then how competencies can be used, refined, and reused. I think of the evolution of things like USB, and similar standard interface protocols. You get from having all of these different serial interfaces and connectors to one universal serial port that everyone can use. You now have a place where whatever you have connected on one end can be connected with anything else on the other end. That is the vision.

With the competency definitions, we’re trying to have these really good definitions of competencies that are structured in such a way that they have enough information in them that they can be repurposed and reused in various contexts. We are avoiding approaches that make competencies so restricted that they can only be applied in one area.

When we start talking about how competency definitions connect to each other and to other things we are talking about clustering. Are we grouping the competencies and matching them to job roles and work activities? Or are we clustering competencies to describe a curriculum or even the breadth of knowledge and skill required by a discipline? Are we doing both, depending on the context?

We have started the conversation and are harvesting ideas from the group using all of these different lenses about how people are doing it now, in what context and what they are using the competency clusters for.

We want something that is usable and transferable, but we also want to rough in any components that we may need for the future. It’s like building a house – if you rough in the plumbing for an extra bathroom in the basement, you can add one if you need it. But if you didn’t and want to add one in five years time, you’re going to have to jackhammer the floor.

For example, if somebody says that they are going to group and cluster competency definitions in a way that is going to link them to job roles and job tasks, we need to make sure that the definition is going to be conducive for that. We don’t have to define everything for every possible use, but there has to be an opportunity to put new things into competency models and to connect them in new ways.

Ibbaka: Imagine you were talking to a younger version of yourself. What would you say to that person about the skills they should be developing that will be valuable and transferable across their lifetime?

Dennis: The first and foremost thing is interpersonal skills, and the importance of personal relationships and emotional intelligence. Understanding yourself, understanding your interactions with other people, and how to develop and nurture good working relationships. How to communicate effectively with people, how to ask good questions, how to observe and ask questions at the right time. All of those things are important, and they last.

Also important are critical thinking and problem-solving. No matter what you are doing, think about how you’re doing it now and if there is a better and more efficient way to do it.

Never think what you are doing or learning isn’t going to be useful in a different context. Everything you do and learn is an opportunity. It is important that you play to your strengths, identify where you can grow and develop, and be able to recognize when that is necessary.

Trying new things and finding out something that you hate doing is just as important as finding out something that you love doing. You don’t have to feel that you have to pick a lifetime career with your first choice. You might go into something and not like it, so you shift gears, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Ibbaka: 2020 was a pretty crazy year for many people. What are some of the strategies you’ve used to get your family through the year?

Dennis: I started working from home in November 2019, so I transitioned six months before the majority of people. I’m an introvert, so I enjoy being by myself and having more alone time, but also have maintained connections with people from coast to coast through technology. Both our kids live locally, so I’ve been fortunate that way. I have a lot of friends and connections in the tourism and hospitality industry still and they’ve been hit terribly hard. I’ve been trying to do what I can to help and support them, even if it’s just from a distance. Helping people transfer their skills, and these people have a lot of skills, into new opportunities is important to me, and those same strategies will help rebuild those impacted industries when things like international travel return.

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