My own experience has led me to discover a cause to which I am fully committed: Professional Resilience, the ability to decide what, where and when to work, to maintain control of our career at all times. I want to contribute so that we can all exercise this right.
Being aware that facing this challenge requires progressing in different courses of action, in this case I focus on one: fostering expert advisory as a labor opportunity for senior professionals.
I understand expert advisory as a profession in which:
- The senior advisor brings a unique and independent perspective based on his/her deep experience in a subject matter. We are all experts in something. The challenge is to identify where lies our differential expertise, the space in which knowledge and intuition are intertwined.
- A person or organization hires the advisor's services to guide or optimize strategic, operational or organizational decisions or initiatives.
- Service fees are structured usually according to dedication and sometimes also to results. Collaboration formats are agreed on a case-by-case basis: for example, a one-off meeting or mentoring support throughout a project.
The reality is that collaboration with independent experts is an unusual practice in the Spanish business environment, despite its attractive return on investment. A second expert opinion can be very impactful in decisions worth hundreds of thousands or millions of euros; for example identifying improvements in a business plan or questioning the feasibility of a growth strategy.
What can we do? Except for those managers who "don't know that they don't know" and who by definition do not want to know about other perspectives, the involvement of the whole labor ecosystem can break the inertia and accelerate the development of expert advisory in Spain:
- We ourselves, as managers of our professional careers, can guide them to gradually acquire knowledge, experiences and abilities that enable us to work as experts in our senior stage if we decide to do so.
- Governments, businesses, academia and social entities can make a decisive contribution with dissemination, experimentation, employment and development programs aligned with this objective, as well as promoting platforms that connect companies and startups with experts.
All parties win with the growth of quality expert advice, which has the positive impact derived from enhancing Professional Resilience: greater economic wealth and lower senior unemployment. Sustainability in its purest form.