Skills Competency Frameworks Demystified

A skills competency framework allows your company to determine the skills, behaviours, and attitudes that employees must possess to be successful in their job. Can you be sure they are competent at the tasks for their job? Put simply, how can you know what you should measure?

Many people believe conventional training is usually a dependable gauge.  Some others might believe that individual attributes hold the answer to successful job behaviour.

A far more comprehensive method of approaching employee skill sets can be to connect personal effectiveness towards the objectives of the organization. To do this, many businesses utilize a skills competency framework.

A skills competency framework represents the built-in expertise, skills, opinion, and characteristics that individuals should need to perform a job role successfully. By using an identified group of competencies for every position within your enterprise, it demonstrates to employees the particular behaviours the company believes is necessary.

There are various company advantages to be had from connecting individual effectiveness with business objectives and principles.

Determining which competencies are essential for achievement in your business will assist you to perform the following:

• Ensure that your employees display satisfactory experience.
• Recruit and select new employees a lot more efficiently.
• Assess effectiveness much more successfully.
• Determine skill and proficiency gaps far more efficiently.
• Deliver better tailored instruction and professional growth.
• Prepare better for succession planning.
• Create change management procedures to perform even more efficiently.

Just how do you identify the required skills and competencies for successful performance?

This can be accomplished with the addition of a skills competency framework to your talent management program.  By incorporating competency details, you will create a consistent strategy to performance that’s crystal clear and available to everybody in the business. The skills competency framework describes precisely what individuals have to do to be able to be successful in their jobs.  As well as it clearly defines exactly how their roles pertain to business objectives and success.

Next let’s take a look at the techniques you will need to use to create a skills competency framework within your company.

Designing the Skills Competency Framework

The skills competency framework describes the expertise, skills, and characteristics required for individuals roles within the company. Each employee’s role is going to have its own group of competencies necessary to carry out the work successfully.

To develop the framework, it is advisable to create a team that possess an in-depth knowledge of the particular roles within your company. To do this, it is possible to consider a few different strategies:

• Utilize a pre-set selection of typical, common competencies, and subsequently customize it towards the distinct requirements of your company.
• Utilize outside experts to develop the framework for you.
• Build a common corporate framework, and utilize that as the grounds for various other frameworks as required.
  • How to Define Employee Skills for Your Organization
• Building a skills competency framework takes a substantial amount of hard work.
• Utilize applicable competencies.
  • Ensure that your competencies you incorporate relate to all roles included in your framework.

In the event you incorporate irrelevant competencies, individuals will probably find it difficult relating to the framework in general. For example, if you developed a framework to include the whole company, then financial operations would never end up being incorporated unless every employee needed to have those global competencies. On the other hand, a framework addressing management tasks would more than likely include the financial management competency.

Creating the Skills Competency Framework

Step One: Get ready

1. Define the objective – Before you begin examining jobs, and determining what each position requires, ensure you consider the goals defined for developing the framework. The way you intend to make use of it will influence who you include in planning it, as well as how you establish its extent. For example, a framework pertaining to filling a job vacancy will become very unique, whilst a framework intended for assessing succession planning will need to be able to include a wide range of jobs.
2. Build a skills competency framework team – Involve individuals from all aspects of your company that will utilize the framework. Where feasible, try to depict the diversity of the business. It is also essential to consider long term requirements, to enable you to maintain the framework up-to-date as well as pertinent.

Step Two: Gather Details

This is actually the primary portion building the framework. Typically, the better the information you gather, the more precise your framework will end up being. For that reason, it is a good idea to think about which methods you will employ to gather information about the jobs, and the effort associated with each one. You may wish to make use of the subsequent:

1. Watch – Observe individuals while they are carrying out their jobs.
2. Interview individuals – Speak with staff independently, select a sample of individuals to meet with, or perform a team interview. You may also wish to meet with the manager of the job you are examining. This helps you discover precisely what a wide variety of individuals feel is required to the role’s success.
3. Generate a list of questions – A survey happens to be an effective method to collect details. Invest some time ensuring you ask the right questions, and think about the problems of dependability and credibility. Should you choose, there are standard job assessment questionnaires you can purchase, as opposed to trying to generate your own.
4. Evaluate the job – Which actions are employed to carry out the work included in the framework?

Step Three: Develop the Skills Competency Framework

This particular phase entails grouping all of the behaviours and skill sets into competencies. Adopt these measures in order to help you with this undertaking:

1. Group the assertions – Request that your staff associates read through the particular behaviour statements, and classify them into groups. The objective will be to get three or four stacks initially.
   1. For example, manual skills, decision-making and judgment skills, and social skills.
2. Develop subgroups – Breakdown each of the bigger stacks into subcategories of relevant behaviours. Usually, you will see three or four subgroupings for each bigger classification. This provides the basic composition of the skills competency framework.
3. Polish the subgroups – For each of your bigger categorizations, establish the subgroups even more. Consult yourself why as well as how the behaviours connect, or don’t connect, to one another, as well as modify your groups as needed.
4. Establish and name the competencies – Inquire with your staff to determine a particular competency to characterize each of the scaled-down subgroups of behaviours. Then they can also name the particular bigger classification.

Step Four: Implement

1. As you roll out the completed skills competency framework, keep in mind the concept of communicating.  In order to help acquire buy-in from employees at all levels of the business, it’s essential to convey to them why this framework was created, and how you’d like it to be able to get utilized.
   1. Best Practices in Skills Management Techniques

Conclusion

Creating a skills competency framework can be a powerful approach to evaluate, preserve, and monitor the expertise, skills, and characteristics of individuals within your company. The framework enables you to determine existing competency levels to make certain your employees possess the knowledge required to increase their value within the organization. It also helps supervisors make knowledgeable choices about talent recruitment, retention, and succession approaches. Furthermore, by determining the particular behaviours and skills required for each position, it allows you to budget and prepare for the training and development your organization really requires.

The approach of developing employee skills include individuals actually performing undertaking the jobs to assess actual tasks, as well as explain actual behaviors. The increased amount of understanding along with linkage between personal roles and company effectiveness definitely makes the energy definitely worth it.