How Fit Are You?
There are plenty of recognizable and relatively accurate standards that measure various types of fitness such as physical, mental, financial, and even cultural fit to an organization or company. Each Armed Service uses an annual or biannual Physical Readiness Test (PRT) to measure the fitness of its soldiers, sailors, marines, and airman; Credit Score agencies and investment portfolios are strong indicators of financial health; IQ tests, standardized testing, and personality tests can quantify both intellectual and mental capacity.
But do you know your Technical Fitness score or even how to find it? The answer is ‘no’ because it has never existed before. There has never been a quantifiable standard in place that would allow for such a determination to be reached and validated across infinite variables.
What is Technical Fitness? Technical Fitness measures your ability to meet the Technical Requirements of ANY job posted in the English language, or to show you the fastest way to ‘Upskill’ to that Job. More formally:
Technical Fitness is how your education, experiences, and skills sets combine to allow you to properly meet and/or exceed the various requirements, activities, and tasks associated with any given job or combination of jobs at any company or enterprise.
OR
Technical Fitness determines if you are qualified to interview for a job or not.
Among many, the primary reason you get hired for a job is because the company believes you are a Technical Fit for the position. That is, you met or exceeded the minimal technical requirements deemed necessary for completing the job’s tasks. The more defined and/or technical the position, the more Technical Fitness is important in the hiring process.
The technical requirements of most job postings are usually prioritized from top to bottom that capture years of experience, education level, area of study, certifications, clearance level, interpersonal skills, and so forth. Combining ALL of these technical requirements gives each posting a Job Technical Fitness level. Technical Skills are on top because the Technical Fitness of the candidate is THE most important factor for any initial job screening. If an engineering and architectural firm needs civil engineers, the candidate MUST be technically fit to meet the job description requirements before any of the other variables such as corporate culture fit and personality traits come into play. I’m sure we are all in agreement that we want our bridges built by technically qualified individuals — I really don’t care about that engineer’s cultural fit score or how ‘socially flexible’ he or she is. Also, if you look closely the individual Job Technical Fitness requirements are a direct correlated to the job’s salary level. No surprise, but almost always the more technical job description, the higher the salary.
Technical Fitness for Transitioning Military & Veterans
In essence, many job seekers, to include transitioning military and Veterans, already take an unconscious Technical Fitness (TF) approach to every job posting they read. If you think you meet or exceed the posting’s Job Technical Fitness (JTF), you send the company a resume. If you think your TF is a stretch to meet their JTF, you rewrite your resume with creative flare, and then send it. The most common result is that you never hear back from the company; and so, repeats the cycle more and faster until something happens.
You know what they say about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get a different outcome…. yeah, you know the rest.
What is the problem? Why is this happening? The root cause is that the entire labor market/job searching/opportunity alignment still operates in its antiquated ways — like it did 10, 20, 30+ years ago. In the last 20 years, we have seen a proliferation of job boards (Monster, Indeed, LinkedIn, Zip, etc.), but all they have done is double-downed and reinforced the problems that have created a broken system. They have not fixed the root problem, which is the ENTIRE SYSTEM IS ANALOG! There is no fully integrated labor data exchange system like you see in financial markets, supply chain, etc. to exchange an individual’s Technical Fitness data with a company’s Job Technical Fitness data. Because the entire system is analog….
- There is zero standardization of Job Technical Fitness across all company jobs postings, so you have to interpret your own Technical Fitness to every job every time
- You have to rewrite your resume every time, even through your Technical Fitness components (Edu, Yrs. Exp, Skills, etc.) are stable (i.e., data)
- Your resume has 90% chance of getting a 10-second glance or less because recruiters can’t see how your Technical Fitness aligns to all their jobs.
- The resume you dumped into a company’s “Talent Network” sits there because the company has no mechanism to see how your Technical Fitness aligns to any new postings.
Oplign actually attacks and defeats the root cause of all these problems
It’s the 21st century; we are drowning in data; and everyone has the entire computing power of 1969 NASA in their phone. But we continue to craft love letters to jobs postings and drop them into an Applicant Tracking System mailbox, knowing that chances are very slim of getting a bounce back. Oplign is here to fix all of that, and to move us all from random analog searching to data driven targeting of jobs, companies, and new skills you may need to acquire. Oplign is the world most advanced employment targeting platform because we know the Job Technical Fitness of every job in the English language…and if you give us 5 minutes, you will know how your personal Technical Fitness aligns to every job’s Job Technical Fitness.
Using a selective combination of AI and machine learning algorithms along with natural language processing libraries and applying military “targeting” principles on every company career site every night, Oplign is changing the way people and companies interact in the labor market by eliminating all those analog-generated and legacy barriers and replacing it with an advanced, one-of-a-kind, Job Targeting application.
About the Author: Mike Grow is the CEO and co-founder of Oplign. He was a peace-frog in the 90’s and has spent the last two decades in technology consulting, defense contracting, and AI development. He read a lot of history books on a lot of tarmacs, and watched a lot of movies on float, so we apologize in advance for any and all esoteric movie quotes or references to obscure battlefields that slip by the editors.
