Opportunity identification competence and potential links to the learning of individuals and organisations. Review of key issues and relevance of the opportunity identification competence assessment in Slovakia
Opportunity identification competence and potential links to the learning of individuals and organisations. Review of key issues and relevance of the opportunity identification competence assessment in Slovakia

Summary/Abstract: The future of jobs depends on the capacity of individuals to develop new skills all throughout their working lives. The technological changes taking place over the past decades which are to be fully reflected in the world of work in the coming years introduce new pressures on the labour force. The scope of current and newly anticipated skills and an individual’s responsibility to remain flexible over considerably longer periods of his/her working life is unprecedented. It is of particular concern to societies as to how individuals at all stages of life adapt to the changes. In many developed countries, keeping different age cohorts at work might be crucial for preserving a country's welfare system. At the same time the young generation in Europe struggles with effectively adapting to the knowledge received in formal education and too many young adults are not able to assume an adequate and full time job position. A demand for new skills is therefore evident at any stage of working life. Development of the opportunity identification conceptual framework followed a huge amount of research work on entrepreneurship that focused on the role and performance of individuals or companies and the factors determining the entrepreneurial success. However, this approach has not allowed nor produced a satisfactory conceptual framework for further advances in entrepreneurship studies. In the absence of a more encompassing concept, the overall picture of entrepreneurial processes remained diffuse and prevented deeper understanding of the role of organisational structures and employee or firm level learning processes involving skills and competences. The opportunity identification competence is being increasingly recognized in psychological, educational and economic research as a crucial skill closely connecting an individual and his/her future professional and personal prospects. The opportunity identification competence is linked to the ability of an individual to spot or generate ideas and solutions addressing particular needs or solving problems by new or improved products, services or processes. We discuss here the concept of the opportunity identification competence and how it relates to individual skills and their development from the point of view of individuals and firms. We present in more detail the recent experimental research on the opportunity identification competence at employee level developed by Lans et al. (2015a) and Baggen et al. (2015b) where also important links to innovation and the workplace learning were explored. We inquire about connections to the foundations of skills research and to the cognitive science concepts such as generativity, openness, creativity. Our interest to keep connections between the opportunity identification competence and socio-psychological concepts has also a pragmatic rationale. Activities including elements of applied psychology offered to companies have proved as particularly well suited arguments for approaching executive management and human resource development professionals at firm level in Slovakia in the process of recruiting companies for participation in the activity. This is related to the currently high popularity of psychology as a field of research. This paper is intended to serve as a methodological journal for the application of the Opportunity Competence Assessment Test (OCAT) in the Slovak environment and cross-country comparisons, especially with Lans et al. (2015a) research on small and medium sized enterprises. Until now there is no available evidence from research on the opportunity identification competence in Slovakia either from a sample of students or employees or individuals in general. Evidence on entrepreneurial perceptions/intentions of individuals as discussed above suggests interesting insights into the area of the formation of skills, competencies and related learning mechanisms. We discuss methodology issues, including possible enhancement and adjustments to data collection methods that could help improve the quality of collected data as well as help reaching a higher success rate in company recruitment efforts. The advantages of assessing employees of companies (as opposed to assessing respondents from the general population including those who are non-working or unemployed) are: i) a homogeneous work environment, ii) a shared organizational culture, iii) socio-economic homogeneity of groups in the sample. In promoting the opportunity identification competence as a learning process we argue that learning organizations are more likely to have higher levels of individual opportunities competence in its organization (Lumpkin, 2005). This is a strong argument that can be communicated to company owners and managers. The OCAT activity has more straightforward connections with alertness, problem solving, risks identification and evaluation. These often resonate in interviews with managements on the subject of lifelong learning needs of employees. Company executive managements and human resource professionals might be more open to arguments on improved flexibility and proactivity of employees (including planning, organizing, managing and evaluation).The proactive and initiative behaviour and the demand for turning ideas into actions are frequent motivational topics directed by management/owners towards employees. While even though inspirational, rhetoric often does not reach a wider range of employees, OCAT activity might be the right choice of activity that could mediate such outreach. In the context of changing professions and requirements for new skills, we are proposing that opportunity competence framework has relevance not only to entrepreneurs, (founders and or owners of new or existing ventures) but to individuals and employees in general. Lans et al. (2015b). We outline possible connections and importance for employability, skills upgrade, individual development and company development through incremental benefits of wider workforce. Improving employability is the key policy priority in the EU countries, concerning all generations of individuals. Youth unemployment( including graduates), unemployment of different age cohorts of individuals, incidence of long term unemployment, and hardships in dealing with long term unemployment of low skilled individuals are only a few items on the list of the current problems in contemporary societies. There exists an authentic demand for new approaches to individual skills development. The opportunity identification competence might be the crucial innovative approach because of its novelty, advocacy of employee importance irrespective of company hierarchy and promotion of lifelong learning and workplace learning mechanisms. This has been recognized also by European policies (EP 2006 a,b) in a decision on lifelong learning actions and recommendations on lifelong learning competencies and skills which list also entrepreneurship and specifically opportunity identification skills. Finally, we point to the generally limited empirical evidence on opportunity competence, and lack of such evidence for Slovak companies. An experimental approach to opportunity identification and application of the method developed by Lans et al. (2015a) and Baggen et al. (2015 a,b) might via its original and complex view of opportunity competence generate crucial and novel information on adults skills, competencies and employability development in Slovakia.

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