Which ones of your competencies should you highlight for an MC 4.0 company?
If you are applying for a job position in an MC 4.0 company, you should consider that MC 4.0 companies need people with certain individual competencies.
Obviously, the exact competency profile depends on the specific company as well as the specific role you are applying for. More specifically, if you would like to cover the position of “configuration manager” or “user interface expert for configurators” then the company requests can be quite specific, as you can guess by reading the description of these professional profiles. However, even if you would like to apply for other roles in an MC work context, the following questions can help you to single out information about your competencies that could signal your particular suitability for such work context.
- To what extent do you possess the attitudes and soft skills of: negotiation, customer orientation, efficiency and achievement orientation, flexibility, information seeking, analytical thinking, pattern recognition, planning, initiative, teamwork and team management?
- What is your level of knowledge regarding: management of variety and customization of products and services; mass customization levers; characteristics of standard, configurable and special products; product configuration process; characteristics and representation of a product from the commercial, technical, production, costing and pricing point of view?
- To what extent do you possess the skills to: develop a mass customization strategy; implement mass customization levers; analyze a configuration process and its interdependencies with other business processes and systems; choose, implement, and use supporting IT systems of MC 4.0; collect and make explicit product and process knowledge; manage projects and work teams; manage and overcome resistance to change?
To write a professional CV and to be prepared for the selection phase, you should be able to provide, at least for the individual competencies (attitudes/soft skills, knowledge and skills) that you have declared to possess and which you believe to be the most significant:
- evidence of the possession of these individual competencies
- information on the context / situations in which you acquired them
- information on the context / situations in which you applied them.
Providing this evidence is the first step in the process of recognition and certification of individual competencies. The identification of competencies and their possible certification will become increasingly common practices, on the one hand, they allow companies to evaluate and choose their personnel more precisely and, on the other hand, allow workers to present their competencies in a clear and professional manner to employers and training institutions.
