高才低就未必沒前途

“You’re overqualified” may be the worst of many bad reasons for not getting the job. The message to the candidate is plain: not only have you failed, you have also wasted time and effort building up redundant diplomas, superfluous career experience and unnecessary technical skills.

“你的資歷太高”可能是求職被拒的諸多糟糕理由中最差的一個。它傳遞給求職者的信息很明白：你不僅失敗了，而且還把時間和精力浪費在積累多餘的學歷、過剩的職業經歷和沒必要的技能上。

The glib rejection hides a range of concerns including the fear that such applicants will be too costly (even if they protest they are ready to work for below their market rate); too snooty (despite their grovelling displays of humility), or too hard to please (notwithstanding their desire for one thing and one thing only: that job).

用這種圓滑的藉口來拒絕求職者，背後隱藏了一系列的擔憂，這包括擔心僱用求職者的成本過高（即便他們強烈聲明已準備好接受低於他們的市場價格的工作）；擔心他們太自大（即便他們會低聲下氣展現他們的謙卑）；擔心他們不容易滿足（儘管他們想要的有且只有這一樣東西：這份工作）。

Meanwhile, at the highest levels of most organisations, the cult of busyness prevails. The assumption that it is almost always great to be stretched, and terrible to be slack, encourages the idea that relentless striving, up to the brink of chronic overwork, is optimal. Downtime, on the other hand, has become a sin.

同時，在大多數機構的最高層，對於“忙碌”的崇拜很盛行。有關“全力以赴是最偉大的，偷懶放鬆則是可憎的”這種思想，鼓勵了這一種觀點：堅持不懈的努力，直至瀕臨長期過度操勞的邊緣，是最優的。另一方面，放鬆休整則成了一種罪過。

It turns out, though, that the joke is on the recruiters. A new study for the Academy of Management Journal suggests that once well-qualified employees have breezed through what they were hired to do, they often put the rest of their time to highly productive use.

然而事實證明，鬧笑話的往往是招聘方。《管理學會期刊》(Academy of Management Journal)一份新的研究表明，一旦資質良好的員工對本職工作輕鬆掌握之後，通常會富有成效地運用他們的剩餘時間。

This is a useful finding. Plenty of people find themselves in jobs they can do all too easily. Across the OECD, the Paris-based club of mostly rich nations, a quarter of workers report a mismatch between their skills and their job specification, with over-skilling more common than under-skilling. As automata advance up the professional payroll and well-qualified humans are driven to apply for lower-spec work, this gap will get wider. Knowing how to manage these people will become more important.

這是一個有用的發現。很多人發現自己的工作完全可以很輕鬆完成。在總部位於巴黎、主要由富國組成的經濟合作組織(OECD)的成員國中，四分之一的員工報告自己所具備的勞動技能和職位要求之間不匹配，其中“技能過剩”比“技能不足”更常見。隨着自動化推高專業人士的薪資，而高資歷的人員被迫去申請較低等的職位，這種過剩將越來越大。懂得怎麼管理這些人將變得更為重要。

Fears that the overqualified will become demotivated are well-founded. Anecdotes abound about the fate of the extravagantly underworked. There was the French manager who last year sued the perfume distributor where he worked because he had become so bored that he had a breakdown. Or the Spanish civil servant accused of simply not turning up for at least six years after he was pushed into a dead-end job. People who knew him said he did in fact drop in at the office — but spent much of his time reading the work of Baruch Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher who is himself said to have been overqualified for his day job as a lens grinder.

擔心資歷過高的人在工作中會變得消極，這是有根據的。有關工作太輕鬆的人有不少逸聞趣事。法國一名經理人去年起訴了他所供職的香水分銷商，原因是他因無聊而患上了神經衰弱。還有一名西班牙的公務員受指控有至少6年沒有上班，只因他幹着一份沒前途的工作。認識他的人説他事實上去了辦公室——但大多數時間都是在閲讀巴魯赫?斯賓諾莎(Baruch Spinoza，見上圖)的著作，這位荷蘭哲學家對於他那磨鏡片的日常工作據稱也是“資歷過高”的。

The new study confirms the threat of boredom — but only when the distance between an employee’s qualifications and the tasks he or she is carrying out becomes too great. Otherwise, Bilian Lin and Kenneth Law of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Jing Zhou of Rice University observed something different, and more positive. Staff with a bit of slack use their spare time to rethink how they do their jobs — a practice known as “task-crafting” — carry out more creative activities and contribute to the smooth running of their organisations.

新的研究證實無聊會帶來威脅——但只有當僱員的資歷跟他們所從事的工作之間的差距變得太大時才會成立。反之，則如同香港中文大學的林碧蓮和羅勝強，以及美國萊斯大學周京所觀察到的不同的、更為積極的情況，在工作中略有餘力的僱員會利用自己的空閒時間來重新思考如何完成他們的工作——這是一種被稱為“任務重塑”的做法——他們會開展更有創造力的活動，為所在機構的順利運作做出貢獻。

The academics looked, for instance, at teachers who concentrated on making their classroom activities more stimulating, and factory technicians who used their surplus skills to come up with innovative new products.

例如，學者們觀察了那些專注於讓他們的課堂活動變得更生動活潑的老師，以及那些運用自己的額外技能設計出創新性的新產品的工廠技師。

The phenomenon made me think about the three women in the recent book and film Hidden Figures, who worked as part of a racially segregated group of “human computers” at Nasa during the early years of the space race in the 1950s and 1960s.

這一現象讓我聯想到最近的一本書和同名電影《關鍵少數》（另譯：隱藏人物，Hidden Figures）中的三名女性，她們在50至60年代的太空競賽初期，供職於美國航空航天局(NASA)一個被稱為“人類計算機”的種族隔離小組。

When early electronic computers threatened to supersede them, one of these women, Dorothy Vaughan, taught herself the Fortran programming language. She then transformed her team of skilled mathematicians and scientists, initially hired as “subprofessionals”, into experts in the new technology.

當早期電子計算機有取代她們之勢時，其中一位叫桃樂斯?範恩(Dorothy Vaughan)的女性自學了Fortran編程語言。此後，她重新改造了自己帶領的由數學家和科學家組成的技術團隊，她們最初是作為“次專業人員”而被僱用，轉型後成為新技術的專家。

Some people will prefer to apply their surfeit of unused skills beyond the office (Spinoza being one striking example). But many of those trapped in a skills mismatch would be happier if they could make more of their working day, to their and their employers’ mutual benefit.

有些人喜歡在辦公室以外運用自己未派上用場的剩餘技能（斯賓諾莎就是一個突出的例子），但是對於很多苦於職業技能不匹配的人來説，如果他們能夠更善於利用自己的工作日，用來做對自己和僱主都有利的事情，他們會感到更加幸福。

One important unanswered question, though, is how managers can pinpoint where a team member is on the curve between useful underwork and stultifying boredom. There is no “one-size-fits-all” solution, says one of the new study’s authors.

然而，一個重要的未解問題是：在有益的工作鬆懈和無效的無聊之間這條曲線上，管理者該如何辨別團隊成員正處什麼位置。這份新研究的作者之一表示，沒有“一刀切”的解決方案。

But there are examples of how it may pay to run a surplus of knowledge workers. Asked on about the negative aspects of working at Google, one contributor responded: “The worst part is?.?.?.?that [workers are] overqualified for the job?.?.?.?When it’s standard to be awesome, and the work isn’t particularly tough to begin with, it’s hard to differentiate.”

但有案例顯示，手下有一批技能過剩的知識型員工可能會帶來很大的回報。在美國問答網站上回答關於在谷歌工作的消極方面的問題時，一個答題者説：“最糟糕的部分是……（僱員）對於他們的工作來説資歷過高……如果別人眼中的‘真棒’在這裏只是平均標準，而工作本身又不是特別難上手，就很難脱穎而出。‘”

That may be true. But companies that can afford to hire awesome staff for less awesome tasks tend to stay ahead of the pack — provided they can stop useful underworkers succumbing to unproductive ennui.

這或許是真的。然而凡能僱用“真棒”的員工來從事不那麼“棒”的工作的公司，往往都能保持業界領先——只要他們能防止那些工作過於輕鬆的有用之才被徒然的厭倦弄得崩潰。