OUTLOOK — By Mirfat Al Araimiya — Some years ago China announced short- and long-term plans for the development of skilled workers, this was in tandem with the government’s decision to attract talented and skilled people with the aim of stimulating the national economy and pushing it forward. The plan was to convert the density in the labour force to a density of skilled workers, and to reverse the policy of attracting foreign investments. Besides, the government of China laid down preferential policies regarding taxation, insurance, housing and the rights of permanent residency. The government espoused the policy of attracting the skilled Chinese workers particularly those working in the developed countries.
The policies of China, the world’s most populated country, are a clear evidence of the importance of skills and competencies in the success of projects and in the development process. It is no use pumping enormous capitals into projects that lack skilled and creative workers. In a highly competitive and globalised world, the economic growth hinges on the talented people that are able to create and run the technology.
There are several means through which we discover talents. This can be achieved by the means of on-the-job training programmes or competitions aiming at highlighting the students’ skills. Discovering the talents is just the stepping point. In order for the skills to be honed we have to create a fitting environment that can help unleash the budding talents. Besides, the economic establishments have to embrace viable mechanisms to exploit the gifted people and to make the most out of them. This has led to the emergence of the human resources management as a new science aiming to benefit from the latent creativity of the talented and transform their ideas into palpable economic benefits. A lot of government and private establishments in the developed world have changed their administrative policies in a way that corresponds to the new trend. In this respect Google has set itself as an example to be followed.
The brain-drain phenomenon has stripped the developing countries from their best talents who found better environments which focus on creativity and provided incentives for the meritorious. The advanced world countries went further by setting up institutes and research centres specialising in discovering the skills and improving them.
All civilizations and powerful nations through the history of mankind were built by talented people. Gifted people are quite different from their peers in that they possess unique and even exceptional abilities of creativity therefore the cost of qualifying and training such people is immeasurably less than that of ordinary people.
The secret of successful institutions is the employment of outstanding talents. Since the beginning of the 1990s a different war was fought between firms, a war that doesn’t revolve around marketing or commodity prices. It is totally pertaining to the means of attracting distinguished talents and qualifying them so that they become real assets and winning bets in the pursuit of business success.
All these facts should only prompt us to seek new ways to improve the methods adopted in the field of human resources management, and to embrace novel approaches that enable our institutions to benefit from the talented people we have. It is necessary to shift our attention from the conventional methods of human resources management to the management of the talented.
