Competency Framework

Competency management covers a complex area of people management where there is no consensus on what constitutes an actual competency. In general, a competency refers to the characteristics of a person and the skills they possess. By defining the characteristics and skills that apply to particular roles it is then possible to evaluate how suitable a person is to perform a particular role. This has the effect of normalising the measurement of a person which has obvious applications within HR, most notability in performance management, succession planning and recruitment. This information captured by these measurements can be taken much further by an organisation than just the consideration of individuals, consideration can be given to the capability of a department, team or the entire organisation. For business this then competency management can become a valuable resource as it allows management to know what the organisation is capable of, what its short comings are and to plan for improvement. When assembling project teams of for bidding for contracts being able to identify key staff members with the requisite skills can also be essential for winning a bid and delivering on time and on budget.

Competencies can be broken down into two broad categories, personality traits (such as leadership or approachability) and skills (such as knowledge of a programming language or accounting practice). This can make evaluation of a competency a challenging area. It is not possible to accurately assess the leadership ability of someone who has never led for example, whilst a line manager or HR professional can make a partially informed judgement this can still lead to a poor-quality assessment. That means that effective competency management may mean considering how assessment will be performed as we as how staff members will be given the ability to demonstrate the competencies that are being evaluated. Again, using the example of leadership, a junior member of staff may be naturally subservient in the normal work environment but would perhaps step to the front during team building exercises where the usual structures have been removed. Another example of a challenge in assessment are attributes where an employee may be very capable but the ability is inappropriate. Care must be taken to make sure that the assessor is able to record meaningful information, good communication relates to the quality rather than quantity of interactions and care is required to not elevate the one over the other through a poor understanding of the metric.

Soft Skills

The clarity of the metrics used should also be considered. Lominger provides 67 soft skill competencies that can be used in assessments. These are comprehensive but highlight one issue with competency management, it is not practical to assess a large workforce to such a level. A typical approach to take to tackle this is to focus only on higher grade positions where the most value can be gained from the effort required. An alternative approach is to use a very constrained number of attributes that can be applied universally without adding a large burden of administration. An example of where this might apply is in managing the awareness of diversity within an organisation, this type of competency is generally considered to be a universal requirement.

Other Skills

Away from personal characteristics are skills that a person may pick up through training or education (or experience). These may require assessment by a specialist practitioner and these skills may chop and change over time as approaches and practices evolve and change. Microsoft office products provide an example of this challenge where a person who was familiar with the original version of Word (with very limited text formatting options) could not be directly compared with a someone familiar with the latest version (with hundreds of controls spread over nearly a dozen tabs). Within recruitment this can mean care needs to be taken to make sure that applicant and recruiter have the same understanding of a specified skill. In fast paced areas such as technology the opposite issue can be manifest where skills beyond those currently required are important for strategic decision making. An organisation can not adopt a new technology if it does not already possess (and does not intend to acquire) the necessary skills to run and maintain it.

An organisation is able to define the skills and personal attributes that are required to complete its processes or to work with its products. Through collecting rich data on employee skill sets beneficial insights can be gained into the workforce. There is the potential in that for unexpected discoveries, where a worker from one department may possess the necessary skills to complete a process managed by another department; that insight is valuable for trivial tasks such as finding potential cover but also for seeing through traditional boundaries and divisions within an organisations structure that may no longer be relevant. When assembling a project team sourcing knowledge and specialisms from outside a single department can create more functional working units. In the performance of some contracts, it may also be necessary to show that a certain number of employees are capable of completing a particular process and being able to identify candidates that may make up any shortfall quickly is vital. In this case it may be that specific qualifications are required and these can be recorded as skills where relevant.

Language represents an example of a skill that may be covered from a variety of directions and can be difficult to measure. A person can possess a qualification that implies a competency but it may well be that their actual ability is poor when compared to a native speaker. Understanding that difference can be important if someone is required to work with a partner from abroad where a precise understanding is essential. In this way it is important that within competency management it is understood that a qualification may not infer a person possess the required ability, in a similar an assessment scale for a skill may not be able to accommodate the subtleties of a particular skill.

Scales

Selecting the correct scale for assessing competencies has two main considerations. Firstly, the range of the scale must be suitable for those that are going to use it. If the scale is to broad or insufficient guidance is given then the information gathered using it can be unreliable. Secondly scales should aim to be consistent across the assessed competencies. This means that results will be normalised in a fashion, meaning that when an individual is a considered the knowledge of single scale is required to understand strengths and weaknesses, rather than in depth knowledge of multiple metrics. Some exceptions inevitable exist for this and there may be a requirement to rate different sets of competencies using different scales. That may be because a specific rating exists for that competency (likely to true where a qualification is counted) or an industry specific norm makes it common practice to score it in that way. A five-point scale can be appropriate (e.g., Unacceptable, Basic, Competent, Intermediate and Advanced) in many cases although a three-point scale (Unacceptable, Competent, Advanced) may be easier to administer through assessments. It can also be useful to include in a rating scale an option to indicate that a skill has explicitly not been assessed, this may be as a placeholder for future assessment or to aid later analysis. When considering group level targets for a department or organisation it is not possible to use a rating scale based on words to find an average or median. Ratings should also be assigned a numerical value which will allow this type of analysis to be performed later on. Numerical values also allow for extra weighting to be applied to certain competencies without needing to use alternative scales, an alternative is to assign a weighting to the competency itself and this may be an appropriate option. This broadens the capability of a competency management system without introducing additional burden to an assessor.

Analysis

The analysis of the data collected can be used to help monitor individuals as well as the larger organisation and its subdivisions. At the organisational level a range of goals can be defined as a profile of competencies; that profile can be compared against those of staff members providing an overall rating of whether the goal has been met or if there is more work to do. Using multiple profiles, it is then possible to build up a series of goals representing targets over time, allowing progressed to be tracked and management actions taken. At the individual level a line manager can assess an employee’s abilities against targets they have been set and against a profile for their role. For the HR team the data allows them to identify candidates for mentoring or candidate during succession planning. In turn, based on this information, training plans and mentoring can be developed to level up employees and increase the organisations capabilities.