Thursday, March 06, 2014

COMPETENCY MAPPING

Competencies are the skills and abilities of a person that lead to higher performance in a specific area. It is often expressed as the combination of knowledge, skills, attitude and personality of a person as applied to a job in the context of the current and future surroundings that accounts for sustained success within the framework of organizational values. Therefore, competency mapping is the process of identifying key competencies for an organization and the jobs and functions within it. It explains how a job might be done, a competence only describes what needs has to be done; not how.
A competency can be referred as a cluster of connected knowledge, attributes, skills and other personal characteristics that have an effect on major part of one’s job, correlates with performance on the job, are often measured against well established standards and improved via training and development. The competency indicates the power of the employee to try and do a certain task. The performance refers to what the employee will. The performance system measures the employee worth in the company solely after evaluating his periodic performance, the ‘competency system’ begins mapping and measuring  the worth of an individual much before an employee is appointed on the job and continue to do so till the job/employee exists.

The competency mapping facilitates structured and documented procedures that offer convenience in recruitment, thereby reducing time and employee cost. The predefined criteria eliminate possibilities of wrong recruitment, thereby reducing time and employee cost.  The organization incorporates a ready reference of skill inventory.  Training need identify becomes obvious and precise. The competency mapping provides an additional clear sense of the marketability in today’s job market; once the individual is aware how his/her competencies compare to people who are asked for by the job market in key positions of interest.

The competency mapping plays a really vital role whereas going for performance management. The entire process is intended to spotlight the longer term competency needs and necessities of the organization and measuring the progress of competency achievement in preset directions. Two approaches can be utilized to spot the competence development process. The top down approach starts with the formation of management groups once the business plans are drawn up.

Strategic competency that are needed for the growth of the businesses, is identified  while doing the business planning .Strategy and actions are then known to develop, secure and distribute the competencies with the assistance of department heads/specialists and the management teams. The bottom-up approach begins at individual level and begins while therefore the performance discussions occur, wherever future development needs are mentioned The two approaches are then aligned and the needs are synchronized into a complete whole.

The third method may be known as a process of distinguishing competencies is by using the questionnaire method.  In this method a employment analysis is administered by asking employees to fill a questionnaire that asks them to explain their tasks, their skills, abilities and attributes needed to perform the job well. Identifying the similarities in the questionnaire, a competence based job description is prepared which provides the factors for assessment on the performance evaluation. This will help to guide to perform more objective evaluations based on displayed or not displayed behaviors. Having agreed on the work necessities and the skills and attributes required to progress within it and become additional productive, one begin mapping the capability of the employees to the benchmarks. There are several index points within the responsibility level. An approximate level of attainment is noted against each benchmark indicating the areas where the assessed lies in terms of personal development and achievement. The individual level process is divided into three stages: gap analysis, bridging the gap and implementation.

This gives the HR department a reasonably sensible image of the employee to visualize whether or not he has to perform higher or move a bit on the scale. Once the employee tops every indicator or parameter at his level, he is given a promotion.

Competency management can solely achieve success if the purpose of the competency initiative is clearly established. Once it is integrated with applications that are joined with the organizational aspirations, line managers see it as an enterprise initiative rather than an HR initiative. Once this happen, line managers support the project and organizations ac/skill test achieve their development goals and the expected returns on investments.

The design of competency mapping takes the following steps:1. Map competencies/skills needed for a specific job and specify the desired performance level against that. 2. Conduct a competency /skill test or a skill audit, 3. Measure the current performance level, 4. Conduct a Competency Gap Analysis, 5. Hire or reward if current performance level is more than required performance level. 6. Training Need Analysis if current performance level is less than required performance level, 7. Lay down a proposed performance level, 8. Benchmark the Performance level
The exercise of competency mapping may not add much value, if the top management takes it as another new fangled process.
 
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1 comment:

  1. Understanding the competencies is important in order to achieve strategic and tactical objectives, yet it seems that the interpretation of competency is very broad across firms. I have seen firms that reduce it to time spent in a department (e.g. a "tax" competency), while others define it on more personal characteristics (e.g. communication skills). This creates a situation where we can both be speaking of competencies and yet talking across each other. if we're not careful.

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