As the second annual European e-Skills Week comes to end, it is interesting to reflect on some of the learning points that have come out of the various discussions around the subject. One such point should be phrased as a major question: are we actually ensuring that young people have the ICT and e-skills that they really need to obtain, hold and succeed in a job in the current business world?

Based on my twelve years experience of teaching undergraduate business studies students, I feel that the answer is (a) on the whole, no we are not, and (b) we should be doing a lot more.

In a recent article for the New European, John Vassallo, vice president for EU affairs at Microsoft, wrote: “Right now there are 5.5 million young people under the age of 25 who are unemployed. In Europe the youth unemployment rate has just reached a historic high at 22.4% … Not only does this concern low-skilled young people having left school early, but there are more and more university graduates who also cannot secure work.” This, of course, raises all sorts of issues about the curriculum in schools, colleges and universities but when a recent finding by the IDC (International Data Corporation – a research unit) that 90% of all jobs will require technology skills by 2015 is added to the mix, we have a point of focus: we need to do more to ensure that pupils and students have the ICT knowledge and e-skills needed for the real world. As Vassallo adds, “…the digital competencies that we associate with the young generation, for instance when using a phone application or social networking site like Facebook, are very different to the ICT skills in demand for getting a job in 2012 and beyond.” (my emphasis)

Surprisingly, students enrolling on undergraduate business studies courses are often woefully under-skilled in terms of ICT – they are absolute “wiz kids” when it comes to browsers and social networking sites (and their smartphones), but they have no idea how to use simple office efficiency tools such as word-processing, spreadsheets and presentations … and data base programs, organiser programs and non-web-based email programs are completely beyond them! They all know how “to google” (yes, it has become a verb!) but they have no idea of how to select reliable websites, obtain reliable data or seek out the nuggets of value amongst the millions of pages of utter dross that make up the bulk of the worldwide web. We forget at our peril that any damn fool can publish any damn rubbish they want on the web – and they often do. In years of doing internet-based research, I have come across more ‘random thoughts of empty minds’ than any one should be subjected to. But don’t get me wrong, I am not calling for editing or censorship, or indeed anything in a regulatory form, but rather I am calling for pupils and students to be taught the basic skills and then for the educational institutions to embed those skills aggressively.

At present, by the time I see the first year undergraduates, they have already done a complete semester, they are supposed to have written at least one researched report and one academic essay  (and probably many more than that) but when they start my programme (ICT in a Business Environment), I find that they do not know how to layout or format a page, to select or change fonts and font sizes, to insert headers and footers (or even know what they are) or to use a spell-checker. They have no idea how to under take useful research, offering citations and referencing is beyond them (and so the risk of plagiarism is high), cut-and-paste is their modus operandi (huge risk of plagiarism), and Wikipedia their only thought. When it comes to spreadsheets (a much more complex program) they do not have the intellectual logic processes for data entry, the use of formulas is beyond them, and making charts becomes a revelation (and, for many, a real joy!)

Then there is another issue: the fashion amongst students is to buy an Apple laptop of some description, whereas in the business world probably 90-95% of all computers operate on Windows (and usually something ‘old’ like Windows XP). This means that the students are faced with knowing how to use two different operating systems and probably four different versions of the application program – and a growing number prefer to use the free OpenOffice suit. This makes the arbitrary use of something like Microsoft Office Expert certification something of a major risk – and to impose this compulsorily is to both disadvantage many and to become a sales agent for Microsoft.

My approach is to use a combination of online e-training programs (thank you, Microsoft) and hands-on practice in a face-to-face learning situation to address the knowledge deficiency in the use of the applications, and a different set of e-training programs and a different face-to-face learning situation to teach research skills. Although I know this works, I find it hard to believe that this sort of skills training is appropriate at undergraduate university level – surely this sort of basic skills training should be provided at school, or, at the least, as a pre-university foundation course. Unfortunately, such skills training at schools is still an exception and we simply cannot afford to carry on this way – digital skills and ICT skills and even online research skills must become central to the current shifting educational paradigm to ensure that we are equipping pupils and students with the access skills needed for jobs in the digital age.

Or is it?

If you posted the pictures to a social network like Facebook or e-mailed from an address like Gmail or Hotmail, then all your photographs are still in cyberspace, eternally circulating, awaiting recall at an embarrassingly inappropriate moment. And those e-mails? Well, don’t forget that Gmail and Hotmail have the right to read anything and everything you post on their services, keep it forever and use it as they see fit to ‘provide their service’. As things stand at the moment, you have no right to be forgotten and no right to have your foolish indiscretions forgotten either – even if you delete your accounts. If anyone shared your stuff, reposted or quoted it in an email then it remains out there forever.

In his groundbreaking paper, Digital Footprints: social networks and the right to delete, Alex Mather explores how this all came about and proposes that the law should be changed to allow ‘the right to delete’ our entire digital footprint and to be forgotten. There are, of course, those who disagree with Mather’s position, claiming that the public has a right to know, especially if you are public figure, but they singularly fail to justify why the public has a right to know about the average person for ever. These are the same people who claim a ‘public interest’ defense for journalistic intrusion and fail to differentiate between “that which is of public interest and that which is merely interesting to the public“. I find it particularly enlightening that Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook uses the ‘public interest’ defense and almost always inappropriately.

Of course, the social networks could very easily allow those who wish to delete all digital content that is linked to their profiles – even if shared by third parties – but they have a solid business reason for resisting this move. The social networks, the free web based email, and the search engines (such as Google) are not provided free as a social utility, or because the companies are altruistic, but because they can collect huge amounts of data about their users and when this data is parsed, sorted, codified and categorised, it forms a huge database of demographically selectable information that the company can sell to advertisors in the form of highly targeted advertising space (the life blood of the advertising industry) – this is what makes Facebook worth the estimated $80 billion that stock market analysts are predicting.

Someone once remarked along the lines that as “this is the digital age, you have no privacy anyway”  and research suggests that the young digital natives who have grown up with the worldwide web (i.e born after the late 1980s) are relatively unconcerned about providing personal data to anonymous third parties and are only concerned about what those parties will do with it. Well, now they know: it is stored forever to be used to target them with advertising and to bring huge damage to their reputations when they least expect it.

Alex Mather, a former editor-in-chief of the Social Contract, the University of Western Ontario’s academic journal of political science, is the author of Lights, Camera, Communication: The Effects of Mass Media on Election Campaigns (2009) and has worked in finance in the entertainment industry. He received his Masters degree from the London School of Economics where his dissertation was on the impact of illegal file-sharing on music and film industry revenues. He now lives in Toronto, Canada.

Managing for Performance and The Performance Management Workshop had their origins in the later 1980s when neoliberalism and the economic beliefs of Milton Friedman held sway, when Reaganomics and Thatcherism ruled the Anglo-Saxon world and the communist blocs were crumbling. It was a time when Friedman, the 1976 Nobel Laureate for Economics, and his fellow economists of the ‘Chicago School’ had successfully proselytized the world into believing that free markets, the minimal intervention of governments, and the pursuit of personal good (for which one can read ‘wealth’) was a desirable objective in all circumstances.

It was the time when Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) in the 1987 film “Wall Street” famously declared: “Greed, for the lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works.” And he was believed, admired and emulated by thousands of bankers, traders and entrepreneurs across the world and by the early 1990’s, when I came to write Managing for Performance, neoliberalism had become the dominant economic paradigm of the world – from the Anglo-American heartlands of capitalism to the former communist bloc and all the way to the developing states.

Today, of course, neoliberalism has been discredited as the global economy, built on its principles, has been shaken to it core by the worst financial crisis in a hundred years – a crisis that has been blamed not only on the asset bubbles that were created, not only on the greed, materialism and the obsessive credit-driven consumerism, but also on the culture created by “Gekko-ism” gone mad.

In many ways, Managing for Performance was an attempt to bring a more collective and collaborative approach to the management of people at a time when individualism ruled and it was passionately believed that money motivated everyone. The 2007 financial collapse, the analysis of the toxic cultures of the big banks (such as Lehman Brothers – the bank that started the domino collapse of the world’s banking system), and the continuing legacy of a theory that was pushed beyond a state of viability is still too close and many companies and their managers are still in the thrall of the “Gekko-ism”, the individualism, the profit-driven management styles and the toxic cultures of the last twenty years.

When I was approached with the idea of re-issuing Managing for Performance, the initial discussions focused on updating the book for the 21^st century. I soon realised that it would be far easier to write a completely new book on the subject but, upon reflection, I also realised that the ideas and techniques that had made Managing for Performance an international best-seller fifteen years ago were still absolutely valid today – only the context has changed.

The corporate and organizational cultures in which we work are now much better understood thanks to the work of people like Hofstede, Tromenaars, Deal and Kennedy, Bartlett et al, Schneider and Barsoux and many other researchers who have dissected, analysed, synthesised and generally exposed national and transnational organizations to examination and have offered theories and guidance as to how to manage within them. One thing is now very clear to all managers: organizations reflect their national culture as modified by the culture of the people who work there. This means they have to select and apply those management techniques that work best with the people they are managing.

But isn’t that exactly what all managers have to do at all times and in all circumstances? Of course it is, and that is why the performance management techniques in Managing for Performance are as applicable today as they were when the book was written.

Would I change anything if I were to update the book? Well, yes – I would want to expand some sections (such as motivation) to reflect the latest research in the field and I would want to include sections on collaborative working, virtual teams (and virtual organizations) and managing in a networked world as they all place new emphasis on developing new performance management skills. I would also want to explore the current obsession with the idea that performance management is a technology-based activity (it isn’t, of course, it is about managing people: technology-based performance management applications are for monitoring purposes only).

Managing for Performance presents a number of timeless management skills that have proven to drive performance in organizational environments as diverse as US banking, Japanese engineering, African mining, volunteer charities, Middle Eastern oil production, health care and European luxury goods – used wisely and with a strong focus on managing people, these techniques will ensure that performance will follow no matter where you work or in which sector.

This blog is closely based on the new introduction written for the ebook edition of Managing for Performance.