People underestimate the important of match quality when they overemphasise the role of passion in finding what you want to do. There’s then another camp that ignores what you want to do and just optimise for other attributes like prestige and income. These approaches do not work because they all generate misalignments; and these mismatches can eventually come back to haunt you in one way or another. Being balanced about where you can give and what you can get is key.
The techniques used today in terms of trying to match people to jobs and roles are still rather crude and this stems partly because the market on both sides has shifted without reference to each other too much. The corporate landscape and the private sector is always looking to keep up with consumer demand and new trends which means that their demand for skills tend to be not met by the structure of the current workforce. Yet because of the decades of ‘Great Moderation’, the labour force have in some sense been lauded into thinking that all the training and upskilling they need takes place in schools and formal training environment as opposed to responding, learning, facing difficulties on the job.
Today, skills matching is no longer about trying to just find the right person to fill the right roles because job preferences and skillsets are not catching up with the job roles available; and the job roles are not really aligned with the aspirations that we have created for our generations of workers. Skills-matching is really more about companies being willing to take on people with the attitude and soft-skills then investing in them. To keep doing so even when people would leave, even when that investment only seem to pay off in a limited way. For the labour force, it is about commitment to jobs and work, to also set clear goals for oneself and not just trying to ‘settle’ into a job that will take care of you perpetually.