Are you sure about the person you hire for your team ? ; Are you confident of the skills the new  hire brings to the organisation ? . Do you really know all the skills of the hire ? If you doubt ,read more about Competency.

What is  Competency?

As per google ; Competence is the ability to do something successfully or efficiently . A competency is the capability to apply or use a set of related knowledge, skills, and abilities required to successfully perform “critical work functions” or tasks in a defined work setting.

Competency skills is defined as the skills that are specific learned abilities, that you need to perform a given job well.

As per Merriam-Webster Dictionary  competence is a possession of sufficient knowledge or skill

What is Competency Mapping?

Competency Mapping is  the process of identifying the specific skills, knowledge, abilities, and behaviors required to operate effectively in a specific trade, profession, or job position.

Competency mapping plays a vital role in selection, recruitment and retention of right candidates .When we do the hiring usually identifying the right candidate based on competency is important for the role.

Why do we need Competency Mapping ?

The awareness of what your employees can or cannot do that comes from competency mapping can be leveraged to achieve multiple goals. “A job competency is an underlying characteristic of a person in that it may be a motive, trait, skill, aspect of one’s self-image or social role, or a body of knowledge which he/she uses. The existence and possession of these characteristics may or not be known to the person.” As quoted by Richard Boyatzis

 
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Competency Matrix

A competency matrix is a tool used to document and compare the required competencies for a position with the current skill level of the employees performing the roles. It is used in a gap analysis for determining where you have critical training needs and as a tool for managing people development

 

Process of Competency Mapping:-

 There are different methods to do a competency mapping.

1) Conducting a job analysis:-

This is the first and foremost necessity for Competency Mapping.

Analyze the requirements of the job position, skills and behaviours required to fulfill the responsibilities.

2). Implementing the results of job analysis:

Once you have preliminary analysis in place a proper job description is made covering the competencies in the analysis.

3). Hiring the right talent : With the competency based job description we start with the most crucial step of hiring the right talent holding the competencies as stated for the required role.

4). Retaining the right talent: This is another major role player keeping the candidates rightly engaged as per the competencies they hold.Once the candidate is rightly engaged he is satisfied with the role and organisation and then with proper focus they help in increasing the overall productivity.

Example:-

We  are comparing the competencies of different employees of an organisation for a new project of an online delivery of goods using drone technology. Due to the sudden impact of covid-19 we have a small team of developers working from different locations. As the director of your team  your HR business partner and your project head has identified following key people who can execute and deliver the project within the timeline of 45 days. From the above Example : Joe definitely has the skills to lead and manage the team , If we are of the impression on Joe’s absence it would be Rahul who would lead the project , well we are wrong. It’s Sonya who has the skills to manage the team due to her consistency.  However Rahul can be task master in working with remote teams.

Benefits for the staff

Competency planning is a long range plan for the team and the organization. Based on the teams performance on this project , as a manager you can review and assign new skills for each team member. 1.Managing job expectations Staff gets the benefit of managing the existing job expectations from their managers . This helps in soothing the performance evaluation process. 2.Up-skill , Re-skill &  Resource Allocation As a staff identifying your core competency helps you to have a healthy discussion with your manager to up-skill your existing skills or sharpen your existing skills or decide to move across teams departments that is more suitable for your competency

Benefits for the employer

1.Reduce Turnover Since the organisation has strong tools  as employers you tend to avoid bad hiring decisions. 2. Building High Performance Teams Understanding competencies is important to build high performance teams. Once you map the competency of your team you can place them at the right places to maximise the  productivity. 3.Managing a training plan Based on the current competency you can decide a training plan for the team and this would improve the skills for new projects and technologies.