Keep Your Competencies in Line with Your Objectives

It’s a new year and you have new business objectives planned for it. Are your people trained to meet your long-term business objectives? Does your competency model support your organizational objectives?

New business objectives often require training to efficiently meet them. Planning begins, and the necessary skills, or competencies, become apparent. Many of the competencies may already exist. Using them requires making sure the competencies are up-to-date.

Outdated competencies hinder the development of effective training plans. Just like business objectives, competencies require periodic evaluation to determine if they still meet business needs. The introduction of new technologies, policies, procedures or changes in industry trends may require new competencies. Competencies must continually evolve to remain pertinent.

Just as business objectives address immediate business needs and also attempt to prepare for future ones, so do competencies. If a competency calls for mastery of a program that is outdated and new objectives requires knowledge of a new one, competencies must be updated. As new competencies become requirements they must be supported by appropriate learning interventions.

Examples:
Competencies for running a meeting may include scheduling the appropriate room. Since technology is now more pervasive, that competency may now include scheduling an Internet meeting room and any of the technology that goes with it.

Five years ago, competencies based on the concept of e-business would have prepared organizations to better contend with e-procurement demands. Many businesses were not prepared for the impact that the new global visibility would have on their procurement. A competency concerning the unique issues surrounding e-procurement would have helped them prepare.

Tips to keeping competencies current:

• Assign a competency manager
• Set a competency clean up schedule to regularly evaluate existing competencies for currency
• Check competencies whenever new technologies, policies, or procedures are introduced
• Mark new competencies for future evaluation according to set categories (i.e., technology, policy, procedure)
• Organize competencies into business objective categories to address whenever objectives change
• Assign existing and new competencies to business objectives
• Align competencies with long term objectives to build bench strength to support new initiatives