Strengths of K-Professional

With the advent of the K- economy in globalisation making waves,
corporations must now prepare their human capital to be K-
professionals in the competitive environment. K- professionals
are not only just IT savvy alone. For individuals to be
innovative and competent K- professionals, they must leverage on
the eight core competencies of a k-driven and self- directed
professional to meet the changing needs of the K-economy.

The eight core competencies are strategic thinking skills,
knowledge responsibility, continuous learning, contribution in
innovative teams, professional discipline, innovation and
creativity, solution focus mindset, personal improvement.

These competencies with the support of technology will enable a
k-professional to achieve sustainable performance and ultimately
competitive advantage for their organisation.

A structured identification exercise must be conducted to
establish the two major preferences in thinking - Left- Brained
versus Right-Brained thinking. The Left-Brained thinkers tend to
be factual and logical while the Right-Brained thinkers tend to
be intuitive and non-linear in their approach. For a
K-professional to be thinking strategically, one must be able to
stretch beyond the boundary of their preferred thinking mode to
achieve desired goals. Thus, whole-brained strategic thinking
will enable a K-professional to address personal deficiencies and
achieve strong conceptual mindset.

A culture of responsibility towards knowledge must be inculcated
into their daily challenges of a K-professional. Firstly,
K-professionals must constantly support their leaders, colleagues
and peer groups with current and specialised knowledge by asking
to whom am I accountable to for the knowledge I have. Secondly,
identifying people who can provide critical and valuable
knowledge to assist me in getting things done by asking who is
accountable to me for the knowledge I need. And thirdly,
developing a matrix to import knowledge from multiple sources by
asking where the knowledge can be acquired.

K-professionals must place key emphasis on a habit of continuous
learning by constantly pursuing the process of unlearning and
relearning to exceed the needs of a fast changing economy. They
can do this by adopting the philosophy of "Learning is about
working and working is about Learning", and implementing real
time action plan to translate learning into practice.

As K-professionals, contributing in objective-driven and
self-organising innovative teams is critical for the success of
any K-organisation. Key skills such as self-directed
co-ordination and communication will be inevitable to achieve
desired team results. This means that a unified focus and the
ability to crystallise organisational knowledge are necessary to
encourage knowledge sharing. Sharing of best practices will
encourage the culture of innovation and to avoid repeated
mistakes thus creating a distinctive differentiation from
competitors.

Extrinsic motivation such as stock options and bonuses given to
K-professionals are no longer sustainable because this ploy is
temporal for as long as the emerging industries enjoy a stock
market boom. Today's K-professionals must have professional
discipline to develop a high degree of professional pride to
achieve excellence through self-directed initiatives increasing
favourable perceived value. K-professionals must continue to
build strong positive work habits and loyalty towards their
chosen profession and not the organisation. This is the result of
the emergence of extreme careers and the departure of dream
careers where K-professionals are searching for organisations
that can provide employability and not job security.

K- professionals must have a strong desire for ideas generation
and a passion to create critical and valuable knowledge at the
work place. Creativity alone will not be sufficient in the
K-economy, as significant focus on innovation must be in place to
make things happen. K- professionals must have knowledge, skills,
an attitude and habit for self-driven continuous innovation to
achieve significant work improvements.

Solution focus mindset is the belief that there is a solution to
every challenge and having a positive end result in mind. This
means to say that the concept of local problems with global
solutions by leveraging on organisational and individual
knowledge to create more effective solutions. This can be done
through a culture of preservation by capturing, storing, updating
and constantly leveraging on valuable knowledge to address work
challenges. As a result, higher knowledge retention of both tacit
and explicit knowledge is achieved within solution focus
workgroup.

In addition, K-professionals will synchronise personal focus with
work goals for personal development by constantly creating
personal knowledge capital. For K-professionals to be forward
thinking and self-driven individuals, they must leverage on
intrinsic motivation to achieve sustainable performance.

Therefore, K-professionals are not technology professionals but
competent professionals with the right attitude, knowledge and
skills supported by technical abilities.