We often talk about Process Improvement and Continuous Improvement as organisational capabilities. But we wanted to answer a different question: what value do these skills create for the individual professional? To investigate this, Operational Excellence Simplified conducted research across three separate areas: employment agency perceptions, real job advertisements, and the ISCO-08 international occupational classification.
What We Researched
First, we surveyed 144 employment agencies across 18 countries. Of these, 34 primarily served employees and job seekers, 72 primarily served employers, and 38 worked with both. Rather than asking respondents one broad question about whether Process Improvement skills were valuable, we used five separate proxy questions for each career outcome. Five questions examined employability, five examined speed of promotion, and five examined compensation. This gave us 15 different measures from which the mean results were calculated.
The findings were significant.
Employment agencies estimated that professionals demonstrating Process Improvement, Continuous Improvement, or similar structured problem-solving capabilities had an average 2.89x advantage in employment outcomes. For career progression, the mean response suggested they could progress or be promoted approximately 1.55x faster. For compensation, the mean estimated advantage was approximately 30% higher.
We Then Looked at Actual Jobs
We also analysed 14,000 office job advertisements on Indeed.com. For this research, office jobs were defined broadly as non-manual, primarily desk-based or digitally delivered professional, administrative, analytical, commercial, managerial, technical and support roles. We found that 32% of these job advertisements explicitly requested Process Improvement, Continuous Improvement or closely related capabilities.
Finally, we analysed occupations within the ISCO-08 international classification system. Our analysis found that approximately 20% of occupations require Process Improvement or Continuous Improvement capability, while another 70% materially benefit from it. That means these capabilities provide meaningful professional value across approximately 90% of occupations examined.
The research does not suggest that learning Process Improvement automatically guarantees employment, promotion or higher pay. Many factors influence career outcomes. It does, however, provide strong evidence that the ability to identify problems, improve processes and demonstrate measurable value is a highly transferable career capability.
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