How to turn work into trade in modern companies

Craft, on the other hand, has a different dimension. It is always made up of activities and goals, but also of settled experience, sensitivity, judgement. It is not just about what you do, but how you do it.

The term 'profession' embodies the idea of professionalism: it brings personal skills and creativity into play. In short, it focuses on the person and his or her sense of responsibility towards the result.

The job answers: "What is your role and what are your tasks?".

The profession answers: "What do you do well that makes what you do special and what makes you a reference point for others?".

Job and Trade are therefore not the same thing.

The distinction becomes crucial in an era when automation and artificial intelligence are significantly changing the way we do business.

Jobs, understood as sequences of standardisable tasks, are increasingly exposed to replacement or compression. Jobs, on the other hand, evolve. Because they are based on dimensions that are difficult to automate:

- judgement, i.e. the ability to understand when the rule is not enough;

- personal responsibility towards the result;

- creativity;

- continuous improvement of one's way of doing things.

Changes in the context can turn some jobs into jobs, but it is also true that we, who operate within companies, have the opportunity to play an active role to ensure that - with respect to the goals to be achieved, innovations and technological changes - jobs are expanded, developed and transformed into jobs as well. It is a task with cultural and social significance that we as managers must consider in our responsibilities.

Organisations that, in the name of efficiency, today significantly reduce trade spaces risk gaining speed in the short term, but losing quality, innovation and the ability to deal with the unexpected in the long term. They lose, in essence, widespread organisational intelligence.

If you only offer jobs, the result is turnover, disaffection, decline in quality, loss of meaning. I think young people are trying to tell us this with their choices: when they change companies after a short time, perhaps it is because they have not found elements of trade in their job. They are not running away from fatigue, but from irrelevance.

Companies should ask themselves in which roles they are cultivating trades and in which they are only creating jobs. And make sure that they always include a job part and a trade part in every position.

Without disregarding the role and value of technology and artificial intelligence, but making them allies in the growth of people's skills: every time you increase autonomy, value experience, leave room for professional judgement and build growth paths based on personal input, you are turning a job into a trade.

And it is there that professional pride, enduring quality and innovation are born.

*Founder&Partner bbsette - Consulting, Training and Professional Games