Informative Employee and Knowledgeable Employee

Informative Employee and Knowledgeable Employee 

Date: 20 Jan 2017

In the world of social media, internet, smart phone, technology, digital world and no limitation to what a person can access to since the world today is a small village, all these advancements that happened during the last 20 years has made the information easy to find and obtained, today you can read books, watch movies, ask for any kind of information and you will have it in seconds. This what the people dreamed of years ago and they achieved it, students employees, parents, scientists, lawyers, doctors, professors anal d other professionals and normal people they all use the today technology to obtain information or publish information and researches to the world. But with this advantage of obtaining information people somehow misunderstand the differences between information and knowledge.

When we say information we mean "the Facts provided or learned about something or someone". When we say knowledge we mean "the Information and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject". What is the important to know the differences? To answer this question we have to return to the definition of the two terminologies and then compare it with today employees and we will know why its important to differentiate.

Today we have two types of employees, the informative employee and knowledgeable employee, the definition of these two terminologies are the same as the above one, to explain the difference in more precise we will have a look on both from the inside and understand the importance of this matter.

The informative employee the one who has massive about a subject or some subjects  information and sometimes like google about lots of subjects, this type of employees can answer questions about a subject very quickly and provide explanation on it and he can write a research, articles and even science prepares on it, we can see this type of employee do excellent in schools, recruitment tests and interviews, they just can keep providing information all day long and blow your mind with what they have, but when it comes to real life work this employee become like a nightmare, he know what he suppose to do and how to do it but he is always late in submission, he spend long time on preparing reports, statistics but he don’t deliver the results of the objectives or task assigned, this employee is full of information but as the definition state he only have it but not sure how to use it or have the skills to do, and this is why organization use behavioral interview, instead of IQ test and school grades day, the behavioral interview provides the employer the opportunity to test the person on how used and practiced this information in the past which is predict the future uses and practices. But informative employees are not that bad and they can be very useful for the organization but they should be first identified as informative then recruit them in back office work, consultant, advisers, auditors where information is more likely to be needed than skills and results delivery.

The knowledgeable employee the one who has the information but also have on top of it the skills, behavior and practices that needed to deliver results, mostly the knowledgeable employee does not have massive information on different subjects like informative he concentrate on few subjects by practicing, experimenting, examining, trying and doing that is why he need to be concentrating on few subjects which gave him the advantage of knowledge, skills and behavior the complete set of competency of the subject matter. Knowledgeable employees not always do excellent in written tests, traditional interview and lots of them not necessarily  get high grades in school, but they do excellent in practical tests, behavioral interviews and they provide a list of past experience in the subject matter, this employee can be recruited for front office, sales and marketing, brokers, public relation, human resources, information technology and other types of jobs that need real life work experience to deliver results of the objectives and improve the process by providing new insights and adding to the learning curve of the organization with experience and lessons learned.

The two types of employees are not favorable or counter of each other for the organization both types are needed in some percentages of the organization employees depending on the type of the organization, the size the business they are into and natures of the jobs in the organization.

They only thing that organization need to understand is that information are all around these days and its easy and affordable to everyone today, so its very important to be precise on which type the organization is looking to recruit on the position offered to pick the right type and not ending up with the wrong one.

Mohamed Alzayani

 assoc.CIPD and  assoc.IHRME for human capital management and development