At Vocatio, while we’re excited to be a part of what is an increasingly hot investment space attracting a lot of attention these days, we also have an important cultural and marketplace point of view that we are looking to impact.

I have spent the last 2 years since the earliest version of this idea researching and prototyping a solution to make good on the perspective that for young people especially, talent over skill is an important matter.  Namely because every young person is born with talent; however, most young people have not acquired or developed demonstrable skills that the marketplace can recognize yet.

Now there are a number of platforms attempting to use some type of assessment attempting to match job seekers with jobs.  But it takes more than that.

According to Gallup’s “Exactly What Is Talent Anyway:”

Talent reflects how you’re hard-wired. That’s what sets the concept apart from that of knowledge or skills. Talent dictates your moment-by-moment reactions to your environment — there’s an instinctiveness, an immediacy implied. Talent results in consistently recurring patterns of thought or behavior. To deviate from those patterns requires conscious effort, and such deviations are difficult to sustain.

Knowledge and skills, on the other hand, imply learned behavior, actions that require more active cognitive processing. What you know reveals more about your experiences and education than about who you are at the core. Behavior derived from knowledge and skills can be changed far more easily than talent-based behavior, as new information subordinates old in an individual’s consciousness.

Talent can’t be subordinated. It’s constant and enduring. That’s what makes it talent. Understanding the difference between the two sources of behavior changes everything.

The basis of our technology and mission for Vocatio is to help high school, college students and recent grads discover their hard-wired talents and use that information to ready their potential and to find the right career fit.  For employers, that will mean having quantifiable measures of talent at the job role-specific level to understand the full potential of a candidate.

Stay tuned and join our movement.

Patrick Jones
Founder & CEO
Vocatio.com | @MyVocatio