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SPECIAL FEATURE

Have You Done Your Annual IC Review?

David J. Skyrme

It's quite common at this time of year to review your career plans, make new year resolutions and dust up your CV, the latter especially if you are one of the many of our acquantiance who have been made redundant in recent months because of any downturn in your local economy or your employers prospects. CVs, however, are just one way of promoting yourself to a prospective employer. A good CV relies on a good analysis of your value to prospective employers. A good starting point is to think of yourself as a provider of valuable intellectual capital.

If we believe in the value of intellectual capital, then as well as suggesting that organizations attempt to analyze and value theirs, then the same should apply to individuals. This idea is outlined more fully in Chapter 5 'The Knowledge Networker's Toolkit' in my book 'Knowledge Networking' (http://www.skyrme.com/pubs/knet.htm). There I suggest you consider the following elements of IC:

• Human Capital - your competences; skills, knowledge, experience and in particular how they have been applied to create value for others
• Structural - methods you have developed (often not explicitly), processes you use to extent and manipulate your knowledge; another component of structural capital is your personal networks
• Customer capital - number and depth of your personal customer relationships; unless you have a gagging order, your past or present employer cannot stop you maintaining those relationships. Another important element is your reputation. Testimonials from customers are worth much more than those written by yourself
• Other e.g. intellectual property e.g. do you have designs, methodologies or copyrighted material that would useful to exploit - if you don't want to offer this to your potential employer, consider how you might package and sell it on the growing number of outlets on the WWW.

For each element of IC you need some yardstick to indicate its quantity and quality. For example, are certain of your capabilities or assets recognized as world-class by your key users or independent evaluators? Once you have ascertained the strength of your IC, you have to connect it to potential buyers. There are two aspects to this:

1. Relating it to problems, challenges or opportunities - how can what you have make value for its users? What can they do faster, cheaper, better etc. by taking advantage of your knowledge and IC? It's no use having exceptional knowledge if there isn't a market for it.
2. Packaging and marketing. You have to keep your wares visible to those who you are trying to impress. Remember to use a customer pull approach (address their problems using their language) rather than a producer-led one (which tends to come across as egocentric).

Tom Peters, among others, has been promoting the notion of viewing yourself as a brand that has to be marketed. However, you may find the following resource more useful as a practical guide to assessing your IC: Know Your Value: Value What You Know, Mick Cole, Prentice-Hall (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0273650327/
davidskyrmeass04 (Mick is MD of the Wizoz network http://www.wizoz.co.uk)

Even if you are employment and don't need to brush up your CV, its worth doing an IC review as part of your ongoing development plan. It will tell you how much new IC you have gained (and what you might have lost by not keeping current) and where you need to concentrate on boosting it further.

Email: David J. Skyrme

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