Skills

How would the world change if people were assigned jobs based on their ability and their skill set rather than your career being a personal choice?  There is the argument that some people would react very badly to this imposition, citing the infringement of civil liberty and making a case that those who were made to work in jobs they did not want to do would become resentful of their positions.  Let's assume for a moment that those people could be catered to and exceptions made but for everyone else who was happy enough to go along with the new system, they were to conform.  How would the world change?

This is a fascinating question for me because really it deals with the idea of whether or not you think people today are in the "right" jobs or whether the "wrong" people are doing those jobs.  You can dismiss those that are entrenched in controversy and public opinion already such as positions of a political nature and focus instead on those jobs where there is a measurable performance or efficiency, in other words, jobs where you can actually determine with statistics whether or not the person doing that job is good at that job.  When you start to look into things a little deeper you realise that the reason most people who are bad at their jobs manage to hold onto them is because their employer either can't get rid of them easily or they can't find someone else easily to fill that post if they did manage to do so.

The idea of skills and ability as an indicator of the types of job people pursue is something that is easy to demonstrate as being an inaccurate indicator of motivation.  You will find that people can be divided into two categories when you think about the jobs they should do objectively, those categories are, people who could but choose not to, and people who would but really shouldn't.  By these distinctions I mean, the former are people who have the skills and qualifications to pursue a given career but choose not to because they have no interest in it.  The latter on the other hand are people who will pursue a given career and do what they can to get into it despite not having the skills necessary to do those jobs effectively, even if they manage to get the qualifications that say they do, most education systems only require you to pass an exam to get a qualification, and for the vast majority of students in any subject if you were to give them the exact same exam right now, they wouldn't pass it.

There comes a question of why people pursue the careers they choose to pursue, and I think for the most part there are two motivating factors, the first is an interest in that career which drives the person to want it in the first place, and the second which is perhaps more prominent is the belief that there is a given salary attached to that career that they would like to earn and the belief that if they could only get into that job they could make it almost impossible for the employer to then get rid of them regardless of how good or bad they are at that job as evidence by how many people lie on their CVs about all sorts of skills and abilities including those that are integral to the role they are applying for.

If people were assigned jobs based on objective assessments of which jobs they are most able and most suitable for, whether or not people would accept these jobs I think would ultimately come down to whether the person thinks that job is beneath their social standing and whether or not the salary is agreeable to them.  Most people who would oppose such a system would likely turn around and agree to that system if they were told they would be assigned an executive position that was paid very well because it would affirm the impression of themselves that they have, not because they would actually think about whether or not they could actually do that job.

When I wrote about interviews I said one of the reasons why I hated them was because they don't assess you based on your ability to do the job as they are supposedly designed to do, if recruitment processes were changed to involve a practical element that was weighted so that no person could be appointed to the position who didn't pass the practical, I wonder what impact that would have on the outcome of those recruitment processes, would people who are best suited for a job based on what the work actually involves be successful or would people still find a way to game the system to ensure they got the post even when they aren't really fit for it.