Right out of grad school, I landed a job as a staff industrial/organizational psychologist in a Fortune 150 company. The company had reasonably sophisticated OD and I/O functions that were using many best talent practices. I quickly realized that my graduate program had done an excellent job of teaching psychometrics, job satisfaction theory, leadership impact, culture, and the like. But I also saw that there was a lot of other knowledge and skills I'd need for a successful career.

Luckily one of my first corporate responsibilities was to manage the company's assessment center process. We were the 9^th company to adopt the methodology and we knew that centers had great science behind them (e.g., the 25 year Management Progress Study conducted by AT&T that validated center predictions). My early experience with centers introduced me to the notion of behavioral dimensions or variables (now called competencies) as the criteria and language necessary to describe and measure managerial competence.

Additionally, center research had isolated the crucial competencies of Influence, Problem Solving & Decision Making, Organizing & Planning, Relationship Building, Communications, and Drive/Energy as universally important in making the difference in exceptional performance. To personally validate this list, just think of any extraordinary leader you respect in any facet of your life. Aren't they trustworthy (Relationship Building), articulate (Communications), and efficient (Organizing and Planning)? Don't they exercise good judgment (Problem Solving and Decision Making)? Aren't they driven (Drive/Energy)? And aren't they persuasive (Influence)?

As I worked to master these competencies in different job contexts, I also wondered why they'd been neglected across my formal education. I discovered that there were a few universities, like Alverno College in Milwaukee, who had developed just such an emphasis. They had successful programs in which students not only earned a degree in a specific content area like nursing, engineering, or business, but were also taught the complementary competencies that would enable them to apply their expertise in the real world. But these examples were few and far between.

In the years that followed, OSI has worked with several more universities to differentiate their academic programs through our Polaris^® Competency Model. For a number of years now, executive MBA candidates at Portland State University participate in a Polaris^® 360 survey guided development program and are coached by faculty in the key competencies for business leadership. Polaris^® has also been adopted by the University of California San Diego's Continuing Education Program to complement their executive education leadership development programs.  

Recently, Lipscomb University, a liberal arts college in Nashville, Tennessee, has initiated the most ambitious application of the Polaris^® Competency Model thus far. Having licensed the Polaris^® content, they're now building an academic program that combines the assessment center method with key competencies to offer student  development (and potentially credit!) for reaching necessary levels of proficiency. Employers will not only get a competent engineer or accountant, but also someone trained in what it takes to truly add value in an organizational context from their first day on the job.

It only takes a few years of experience (plus encountering the occasional career "crash" (i.e., a derailment or plateau)) to realize that it's the Polaris^® "soft skills" competencies that are actually the hard foundation that exceptional proficiency is built on. Since I have three sons currently finishing their bachelor's degrees in three different respected California universities, I've had a very recent personal look into current college curriculum. For the most part, I still see the classic and limited emphasis on content knowledge alone. And, of course, I still wonder why curricula continue to neglect key competencies that science and experience have found absolutely essential for career success.