Competency Management

Competency Management: Definition & Best Practices

Is the secret of your company’s success in competency management? Perhaps! For good reason: Competency management can give your team a leg up on the competition, increase productivity, and achieve your goals. And that is how it works…

What is competency management?

Competency management is the process of identifying key qualifications (competencies) that employees need to achieve a company’s goals and long-term goals. The competency management process consists of four key elements:

1. Determine the skills required to achieve the goals
2. Identifying the current capabilities of the workforce
3. Creating a roadmap to develop employees from point A to point B
4. Implement and repeat this plan

The benefits of competency management

The benefits of a competency management process in your company are manifold. Here are just a few of them:

• Training and development: When creating a competency model, your HR department learns what skills, behaviors and values it needs to teach its employees. This will guide the development of training and development programs.
• Organizational Success: Once you’ve identified your employees’ most important competencies, you can work on developing those competencies. This will lead to organizational success as employees will be more productive in their work.
• Core Business Areas: Once you know what skills you need in the workplace to do your core business, you can create training programs so that all of your employees have the appropriate skills. Since your core business is unlikely to change immediately, you can reuse these programs for years to come.
• Streamlined Onboarding Process: When you hire a new employee, you know what type of training they need to complete as part of the onboarding process. You simply look at your competency model and determine which training the new employee needs to complete in order to develop the skills necessary for a successful job.
• Growth Opportunities: Gallup found that 87% of Millennials believe growth opportunities in their job are important. With competency management, you show your employees that you invest in them and offer them development opportunities. This will help you retain many employees because they will feel like they are growing and that their employer cares about their training and development.
• Mentoring and coaching programs: HR doesn’t have to be the only one conducting skills training in your company. You can use older employees as mentors and trainers to teach and guide the new employees through the process. If Google does this with its Googler to Googler program, you should check it out too.

Best practices to optimize your competence management

There are many good examples of competency management:

• Have all your employees work on core business for a while: Zappos, a successful company based in Las Vegas, has all of their employees work on core business for two weeks so that they can learn what their company is about. So regardless of your position, you will be required to work on the phone in customer service for two weeks.
• Assigned Buddy: When you hire a new employee, you should integrate them into your environment as well and as quickly as possible. To do this, you can use a buddy system where one of the older employees guides the candidate around the company and shows them everything. Or you can use the “TINYpulse approach,” which involves emptying a bottle of champagne on the new employee’s first day and throwing a party so everyone can get to know their new colleague.
• A mix of internal and external sources. Once you’ve created a competency model, you don’t have to do all the training in-house. You can give your employees the opportunity to take part in further training events from external (pre-vetted) providers. Randstad is one of the largest staffing companies in the United States. It offers its employees the opportunity to develop new management, communication and presentation skills from a variety of sources.

Competency Management: Frequently Asked Questions

What is competency management?

Competency management is the process of identifying key skills (competencies) that employees need to achieve a company’s goals and long-term goals.

What are the benefits of competency management?

The benefits of competency management lie in optimizing training and development needs, increasing company success, improving core business processes, simplifying onboarding processes and enabling growth opportunities through mentoring and coaching programs.

What are the best practices for competency management?

Three best practices for skills management are to keep your employees engaged in the core business, to have a buddy assigned to them during onboarding, and to provide internal and external resources for development.

Help build a stronger employee L&D program

Competency management can be an important pillar of your company’s learning and development programs. You need to know what skills your employees need to do their jobs successfully, and a competency model will help you do that.