This week’s terms are all about employees: how to nurture and grow their skills, and how to recognize the value that results. Throw out your crusty old business 101 biases, put on your 2009 hat, and read on.

As if keeping technical skills up-to-date wasn’t enough of a challenge for corporate employees and their managers, along comes a whole new soft skill: virtual competence.

According to researchers at the University of Western Ontario, virtual competence is made up of three parts: a person’s ability to build online social relationships (virtual social skills), his proficiency using technology (virtual media skills), and self-confidence (virtual self-efficacy).

According to an article by CIO.com’s Jennifer Kavur, virtual competence is necessary in workplaces where teams are separated not by cubicle walls, but by entire oceans or continents. (Read Kavur’s article here.)

With ROII, it’s a little murkier. It deals with what you cannot see.

And although it sounds like yet another item to embellish on a resume, researchers emphasize that the onus for ensuring employees develop such skills should be on managers, rather than on the workers themselves.

An excerpt from Kavur’s piece captures the essence:

“The more a firm needs its people to collaborate online and work with remote locations and make use of mobile devices like laptops and PDAs, the more they need to look at this ensemble of skills and how they can help their employees develop it.”

The second entry in today’s tech jargon roundup, ROII, goes hand-in-hand with the first. Not to be confused with old-fashioned ROI (return on investment), today’s ROII is modern, new-fangled. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Tech Babble Chief Learning Officer, CIO.com, ROI, ROII, tech jargon roundup, virtual competence