Talent vs. Knowledge

Talent

A talent is often defined as a natural aptitude that someone is born with (e.g., singing, painting or drawing, athletic abilities). People often have to work to refine their talents, but they’re generally innate and genetic rather than acquired.

The difference between talents and skills is that skills can be learned from scratch and improved upon over time. The majority of workplace duties and responsibilities require learned skills, not instinctive talent although talent can certainly make an employee or candidate stands out.

When talent is used in the plural by HR departments and recruiters, however, it usually refers to job seekers, candidates or a population of employees.

Overall, talent has a few different definitions in the workplace, but it’s generally a way to describe certain individuals with naturally above-averages skills that help them perform better than the rest, or to describe a population of high-performing, high-quality employees and potential candidates.

Talent identification:

Self-motivated: A self-motivated person takes pride in their work. They don’t need to be micromanaged, take personal ownership for their work and will often go above and beyond in their duties.

Team player: Team players possess great communication and interpersonal skills. While they may bring a high level of skill in their profession to projects, they’re often sought after because they know how to motivate others and help teammates collaborate.

Results-oriented: Talented people meet and exceed goals and objectives. They are results-oriented and serve as a great example to other employees.

Natural leader: A natural leader inspires and empowers others by creating a trusting and encouraging environment in the workplace.

Creative thinker: Creative thinkers are solution-oriented and often offer a different perspective on how to approach challenges. They maintain a positive attitude and use their intelligence and creativity to seek out ways to overcome obstacles and work more efficiently and effectively.

Knowledge

Knowledge management is activities designed to identify, create and distribute knowledge among the employees of an organization. It also refers to the process of embedding this knowledge into procedural practices and operations to spread it through various ways.

Knowledge can be defined as awareness of facts or as practical skills, and may also refer to familiarity with objects or situations. Knowledge of facts, also called propositional knowledge, is often defined as true belief that is distinct from opinion or guesswork by virtue of justification. While there is wide agreement among philosophers that propositional knowledge is a form of true belief, many controversies in philosophy focus on justification: whether it is needed at all, how to understand it, and whether something else besides it is needed. These controversies intensified due to a series of thought experiments by Edmund Gettier and have provoked various alternative definitions. Some of them deny that justification is necessary and replace it, for example, with reliability or the manifestation of cognitive virtues. Others contend that justification is needed but formulate additional requirements, for example, that no defeaters of the belief are present or that the person would not have the belief if it was false.

Knowledge can be produced in many different ways. The most important source of empirical knowledge is perception, which refers to the usage of the senses. Many theorists also include introspection as a source of knowledge, not of external physical objects, but of one’s own mental states. Other sources often discussed include memory, rational intuition, inference, and testimony. According to foundationalism, some of these sources are basic in the sense that they can justify beliefs without depending on other mental states. This claim is rejected by coherentists, who contend that a sufficient degree of coherence among all the mental states of the believer is necessary for knowledge.

Types:

Explicit Knowledge

This type of knowledge is formalized and codified, and is sometimes referred to as know-what. It is therefore fairly easy to identify, store, and retrieve. This is the type of knowledge most easily handled by KMS, which are very effective at facilitating the storage, retrieval, and modification of documents and texts.

From a managerial perspective, the greatest challenge with explicit knowledge is similar to information. It involves ensuring that people have access to what they need; that important knowledge is stored; and that the knowledge is reviewed, updated, or discarded.

Propositional knowledge

Propositional knowledge, also referred to as descriptive knowledge, is the paradigmatic type of knowledge in analytic philosophy, and various classifications are used to distinguish between its different subtypes. The distinctions between the major types are usually drawn based on the linguistic formulations used to express them. Propositional knowledge is propositional in the sense that it involves a relation to a proposition.

Tacit Knowledge

This type of knowledge was originally defined by Polanyi in 1966. It is sometimes referred to as know-how and refers to intuitive, hard to define knowledge that is largely experience based. Because of this, tacit knowledge is often context dependent and personal in nature. It is hard to communicate and deeply rooted in action, commitment, and involvement.

Tacit knowledge is also regarded as being the most valuable source of knowledge, and the most likely to lead to breakthroughs in the organization. The lack of focus on tacit knowledge directly to the reduced capability for innovation and sustained competitiveness.

KMS have a very hard time handling this type of knowledge. An IT system relies on codification, which is something that is difficult / impossible for the tacit knowledge holder.

Embedded Knowledge

Embedded knowledge refers to the knowledge that is locked in processes, products, culture, routines, artifacts, or structures. Knowledge is embedded either formally, such as through a management initiative to formalize a certain beneficial routine, or informally as the organization uses and applies the other two knowledge types.

The challenges in managing embedded knowledge vary considerably and will often differ from embodied tacit knowledge. Culture and routines can be both difficult to understand and hard to change. Formalized routines on the other hand may be easier to implement and management can actively try to embed the fruits of lessons learned directly into procedures, routines, and products.