In today’s global economy with the pandemic situation firms are becoming more and more aware of the need to have competent employees. One of the core issues organizations are facing is controlling the rising employee cost and couple this with pressure to downsize and manage the show with fewer people, thus increasing the efficiency and employee productivity. Organization are looking out for people who can manage multiple different dimensions of the business and perform different critical roles in the execution of projects or managing the business.
There is now a deeper understanding that any given employee would be ale to understand and manage along with appreciating the need to manage different facets of the business – Time management, Technology, Finance, Marketing, Internal Stakeholder management, market dynamics along with people management, apart from all of the above there is a increased focus on performing the roles and also parallelly building relevant and all required competencies.
Competencies are performance enablers, they are a set of abilities and personality traits or characteristics required for higher degree of performance. Performance is the achievement of set of goals or objectives by an individual.
Competencies include both, competence as well as commitment to a particular job.
Today all organizations are speaking and talking about building competencies, some of them have truly worked in this direction and for other (majority of them), it is just a lip service. Most of these organizations are struggling to define, design and implement the concept of competency management.
Competencies are to be divided into 2 parts:
Threshold Competency: These are essential characteristics that each individual employee needs to be minimally effective, but this would not distinguish between superior and average performers.
Differentiating Competency: These are factors and elements that distinguish superior from average performers.
Strategy formulation and opportunity surveillance are wasteful activities unless the company has internal abilities to execute its decision and at least possesses the chance to develop the required capabilities.
Moving forward, we shall be speaking about Competency Mapping and the process of defining it, we shall explore the concept and provide you with glimpses on the different aspects of competency mapping.
Competency mapping is the process which involves 3 steps:
- Developing competency models – to facilitate competency profiling foreach job / role.
- Identification of competencies – required to perform successfully a given job / role or a set of tasks at a given point in time.
- Assessing competency to measure the extent to which a given individual or a group of individual or a group of individuals possess these competencies required for a given role or a set of roles.
Aspects of Competency Mapping
- What affects the competency mapping?
- What necessities competency mapping?
- What are the tools for competency mapping?
- What are the application of competency mapping?
What affects the competency mapping?
- Management Philosophy
- Customer Requirements
- Business Needs
- Business Process
What necessities competency mapping?
- Right Sizing
- Quality Manpower
- High performance organizational core competence
What are the application of competency mapping?
- Recruitment
- Placement
- Development
- Performance Management
- Career Planning
- Succession Planning
- Rewards and Recognition
- Job Re-design
What are the tools for competency mapping?
- Task forces
- Benchmarking against superior performance
- By HR specialist
- Psychologist
- Questionnaire
- Interviews
- Group Work
- Critical Incident Technique
- Repertory Grid
Tools for Competencies Assessments
- Self Assessment
- 360o Feedback
- Psychometric Tests
- Interviews
- Leaderless Group Discussions
- Role Play
- Case Study
- Scenario discussions
- Portfolio presentation
Steps for Organization to adopt to implement Competency Mapping:
- Develop mission, vision and values for the organization.
- Set Goal for the organization
- Design strategy to achieve goals.
- Specify competencies required for people for specific jobs for superior performance at different levels in the organization.
- Design and apply assessment tools to identify competency gaps with respect to each role or job.
- Design and deliver training or other developmental methods to close the competency gaps
All the above should finally lead to re-deployment / Job re-design or career planning / succession planning.
A golden approach is to have this implement as a part of our Agile transformation and adoption. Different skills and competency would be required for a Project Manager to transform to Scrum Master role or for a Business Analyst to convert itself with skills and knowledge to be an effective Product Owner.
Similar thought process should be adapted at Sponsor or Stakeholder levels, when moving from traditional approach to Agile ways of working …
But alas the organizations and companies today are not paying adequate attention to the right ways of working … the concept today is to get the output to the delivery stage – somehow (by hook or by crook – apologies for being so blunt – but cannot run away from reality)
agilescrumworld 