14 Examples of Competency Management

Competency management is the process of identifying and developing the skills, talents, knowledge and relationships required by an organization. The following are illustrative examples of the competency management process.

Business Capabilities

Business capabilities are processes, practices and services that an organization requires to achieve its goals. An understanding of your current and future business capabilities is helpful in identifying competencies required by your organization. For example, if a firm plans to expand its data center operations capabilities this requires competencies such as network design and devops.

Organizational Structure

Another source that can be used to identify your required competencies is your organizational structure including an organizational chart and job specifications for each role.

Workforce Planning

Planning the future talent needs of an organization. This can be done both at the level of roles and competencies.

Competency Model

A competency model is a means for structuring the competencies required by a role into categories or a hierarchy. For example, skills, knowledge, experience and relationships may be used as categories. It can be a mistake to make competency models too complex such that they are overly abstract and non-intuitive. Flat competency models that are relatively unstructured are often easier to map to roles, business capabilities, performance and training.

Competency Inventory

An electronic system such as a skills inventory or competency management system that is used to capture your competencies. It is often useful to create mappings between competencies and roles, employees, business capabilities, career planning, performance management and training entities. This allows you to identify competencies for a wide range of business scenarios. For example, if an employee quits you can pull up a list of employees who have the competencies required of their role.

Succession Planning

Succession planning is the process of identifying key roles in an organization and building out bench strength to be more resilient to the loss of employees. Succession planning benefits from a well developed competency inventory and may extend this information to include current coverage levels for each competency, estimates of future competency needs and risk measures.

Recruiting

Recruiting is the process of hiring employees that strengthen the competencies of an organization. Understanding the competencies required by a role and more broadly required by an organization is an essential element of recruiting.

Career Planning

Career planning is the process of working with each employee to identify their career goals and communicate the competencies they require to achieve these goals.

Learning Plans

Plans for an employee to develop new competencies with approaches such as education, training, mentoring and challenging work assignments.

Training & Development

Programs that develop the competencies of employees such as internal and external training sessions.

Leadership Development

The development of a pool of talent to support succession planning goals such as minimizing the business disruption caused by the departure of key employees.

Competency Assessments

The process of verifying that an employee has achieved a competency.

Performance Management

Setting objectives for employee performance and evaluating employees against these targets. This produces competency information and may be used in conjunction with competency assessments to credit an employee with having demonstrated a competency.

Competency Reporting

Developing competency data to support decision making and strategy. For example, a report that highlights competency risks such as core competencies that are low in supply and high in demand.

Overview: Competency Management
Type
Definition	The process of identifying and developing the skills, talents, knowledge and relationships required by an organization.
Related Concepts	Talents » Knowledge » Relational Capital » Business Capabilities » Competencies »