By Kim Kemp, CEO of Pure Innovation

Skills development and training is still high on the corporate agenda and today, in general, a lot of organisations invest quite heavily in the training of their employees.

However, whilst companies might have ticked all the boxes when it comes to training, the big issues are still about how do they ensure that what their employees have learned is applied in the workplace and importantly, will these skills show some longevity?

The concept of using electronic social media such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other internet networking sites for recruitment is a growing worldwide trend, says Nritika Singh, MD of Isilumko Staffing, South Africa.

She adds that the extraordinary popularity of Facebook, for example, has created a revolution in social networking, and its use is quickly expanding to supplement business functions such as brand building and recruitment.

A recent discussion on our sister site Skills-Universe (www.skills-universe.com) tackled the topic of questions an employer cannot ask during a job interview.

The old customary procedure of strategy development has a pure and sound logic. It has been designed in order to answer the question: What is it that we should do in order to achieve our goals?

The process essentially involves three stages:

1. Where are we now?
2. Where do we want to be?
3. How are we to get there?

This process is based on Gap Analysis. Supposedly, the competitor who will manage to execute it better and wiser (and will also carry out the strategy with consistence and persistence) will be the one who achieves the competitive advantage over the rest of the market.

I claim that this time honored process is no longer adequate.