Now that we have a great many courses and various trainings in asset management it is tempting to say that all asset managers should be ‘qualified’. But thinking about this I reflected on my own experience, starting from nothing, and I also remembered an interesting dinner one night when a colleague reported that his daughter had an ambition to be an asset manager like him.
“You can only do what I do, if you do what I did” replied her father, explaining that his daughter would need to do an engineering degree and further study as he had done.
“Is that really true?” asked his wife, who had home-schooled their extremely bright children. “Could she not learn by observation and questioning and work her way up from simple to more complex tasks? That is the way she has learnt everything else!”
You and me and, indeed, many asset managers have learnt much of their asset management this way. It is only within the last ten or fifteen years that we have started to teach the processes and techniques of asset management – in seminars, workshops, and in formal education.
Some of you would have a graduate degree in engineering, others would have come up through a background of construction, maintenance, finance, or property development/ management and may, or may not, have formal tertiary qualifications.
A couple of the best asset managers I have known had qualifications — but in nursing! One became Director of Capital Works in a Health Commission, the other an extremely practical policy director in the Commonwealth Government. They really understood the concept of service.
Or consider the Asset Manager I lunched with, who designed and published much sought after practical guidelines in asset management, decision making and life cycle costing, all without the background of a formal degree – just an inquiring mind, the interest to read widely, and the wit to apply what he read. He was, moreover, able to teach these techniques to others who also had no formal training and to design policy that encouraged their use. Now that IS an Asset Manager!
When we consider the number of excellent engineers we know, great at ‘doing’ things, but with little real interest in decision-making, then we would have to conclude that an engineering background may be useful but it is neither necessary nor sufficient.
“But surely we have to have properly qualified people?” Sure, but how do you qualify people to look for better ways to do what has always been done, indeed, better ways to do what they, themselves, have been taught to do? Qualifications and ability are not synonymous. We need to be more flexible and mandating certain qualifications or training will only hinder flexibility.
So yes, keep learning, get qualifications, but in a fast changing world, no set of qualifications can be allowed to be a stopping place. Or to stop us
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