Basics of Competency Modeling

Friday, March 19, 2010

As organizations continue to struggle with increased competition, shortages of strategic management and professional talent, and pressure from shareholders to produce tangible returns, some organizations are beginning to rethink all aspects of their talent management system. While “competency models” were once thought of as the purview of academicians and scholarly work, human resource professional are reconsider the role competency modeling plays in the acquisition, retention, and succession planning of key managers and professionals. In these times of economic downturn, it is easy for the HR professional to assume that high quality strategic talent is abundant on every street corner. As businesses emerge from “The Great Recession”, many are looking to grow new and re-build lost or diminished markets. The identification and formalization of those knowledges, skills, abilities, and personality traits necessary to achieve sustained success and growth is essential to a talent acquisition system founded on competency modeling.

The identification of core knowledges, skills, abilities, and personality traits possessed by top, average, and low performers must be identified and built into an organization’s talent management system as a means of binding the success of both parties. Talent management is as much about selecting the right candidate for the right job as it about de-selecting the wrong candidate for the right reasons. While there are numerous methods available for the collection and building of a skill’s database, i.e., knowledges, skills, abilities, and personality traits, it is the validation of those skills and their association with job performance success or failure that is essential. Depending on the size of the organization, the size of the talent pool sampled, and the financial and time resources available, the organization may choose personal incumbent and manager interviews, focus groups, job shadowing, questionnaires or even video/tele-conferencing as a means of data collection. The key is to capture and validate via position managers examples of work performance at all three levels that will allow those critical factors to be built into the talent management system.

Consider a Pediatric Nurse providing care in the patient’s residential home rather than a hospital setting. No massive hospital staff to back them up in an emergency, maybe the parents are home, maybe not; maybe the home is many miles from 911 assistance. The knowledges, skills, abilities, and personality traits required in this setting are entirely different from those needed in an institutional environment. A competency model can be used to vet out those skills of a superior, average or not so average nurse and link those skills into the selection, retention, training, and succession talent management process for that position. Getting at those key skills means looking at examples of job related performance and determining situations when it leads to success or failure. This requires input from both the nurse and their managers, only they are able to validate the skills required in the various environmental settings the nurses may find themselves.

During the discovery process, it may be uncovered that a home based Pediatric Nurse requires knowledges, skills, abilities, and personality traits not commonly associated with their hospital based counterparts. Many skills thought to be critical for job success or failure are based on the anecdotal assumptions by employees themselves as well as their managers. Competency modeling provides a means to either validate those assumptions or discard them in favor of skills found to be truly essential to the success of the employee and the organization.