Design decisions for developing a competency framework

Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.

A robust job architecture with its supporting skill and competency management platform is required for digital transformation and many organizations are now considering how to go about rolling out this new approach.

Skill and competency management helps organizations to rapidly develop new capabilities, it enables internal mobility and helps people to take control of their own careers. Depending on the phase a company is in - Adaptation or Resilience or Efficiency - the skill and competency platform frames some of the most important conversations about performance in the present and preparation for the future.

There are many moving pieces here. To help you frame the decisions you need to make we have pulled together a way to think through the strategic choices, the critical use cases and the major framing decisions. Working through this will help you to plan an effective skill and competency management program.

Featured resource: download your free copy of the competency management template here

The first place to start when building your competency management program and framework is the cascading choices

The first place to start is with your cascading choices (also known a structured strategic choices). This is a framework developed by Roger Martin and used widely to put strategic choices into context. We have adapted it for use in skill and competency management.

One begins by defining the strategic reasons for undertaking a skill and competency management program. The winning aspirations. This can be things life preparing for the future (in which case it should be combined with scenario planning), empowering the workforce, or delivering current work more effectively.

Then one considers Where to Play. Is a Job Architecture needed or is a straight competency model a better approach? Should there be one or many competency models? Should one begin top down or bottom up and how can the two approaches be reconciled. See the section below on the Three Big Choices.

How to Win choices get down into the details. What is required for a successful roll out and sustained use? How will value to the individuals, to teams and to the organization be measured and tracked? What is the plan for curation of the community (one goal of skill and competency programs is to strengthen skill-based communities). The architecture of the model needs to be defined and the content developed. There are many details to be concerned with if the full value of the program is to be realized.

Some new capabilities are going to be needed to support the program. These range from the design of skill and competencies, to content curation and community support. Many of the skills from learning and development can be applied here, but depending on the use case a background in team building or resource management might be just as important.

You will need a dedicated system if you are going to succeed. Some people are trying to build skill and competency management programs on the backs of their learning management system or learning experience platform, and the vendors are encouraging this. These platforms do not have the robust competency design and management functions needed for success. The other approach is to try to jam the competency model into the talent management system. Talent management systems are a natural home for job architectures and generally support a vestigial skill taxonomy or skill library. If one has very low expectations and is OK managing a skill list this could work. It will not deliver the potential of skill and competency management and it will be hard to build a culture of skill-based performance.

The Key Use Cases for Skill and Competency Management

Once you have clarified your cascading choices, the next step is to focus in on a few key use cases. A partial list of skill and competency management use cases is given below. In the initial roll out, you should not try to support all of these use cases. The best practice is to pick one use case, and if you really need to have more, pick two or three that reinforce each other.

Organization Use Cases

The most common organization level use cases (or business value stories if you prefer) are outlined below. Ibbaka also consider team and individual level use cases which can be as important as the organization level ones.

Assess current skills and competencies (skill inventory)

• What skills are currently present and at what level

• How are the skills distributed across the organization

Understand how skills are being used today

• How are the skills aligned to Jobs, Roles, Teams, Projects

• What skills are used together (complementary skills)

Develop new capabilities

• Model the new capability in a modular and dynamic way

• Use Open Competency Models to accelerate development

• Find the people with potential to develop the skills

Prepare the organization for the future of work

• Use scenario planning to imagine alternate scenarios for the future of work

• Develop competency models that address the key scenarios

• Look for skill gaps between the current skills in the organization and the future scenarios

• Develop plans for when and how to close these skill gaps

Personalize learning and development experiences

• Identify skill gaps between an individual and the organization’s model to target learning investments

• Support a full 70:20:10 approach to skill development

Enable self-directed career growth

• Identify core and target skills

• Use continuous assessments as skills are applied in different contexts

• Correlated investments to performance outcomes

Enable internal mobility

• Publicize available jobs across the company

• Match jobs and roles to skills

• Support cross functional teams

Improve employee engagement

• Empower employees with insight into their skills

• Support career aspirations

• Demonstrate a commitment to employee success

Build cross functional skill-based teams

• Design team skill needs

• Understand the complementary and connecting skills

• Search and combine people into skill-based teams

Know which skill combinations drive performance

• Generally done for Jobs, Roles or Teams

• Requires performance and outcomes assessments

• What combinations of skills are associated with different levels of performance

Build an extended talent network

• See all of the skills available to you through partners and gig economy workers

• Take rapid advantage of emerging opportunities by leveraging your network

Increase utilization

• Leverage internal skills before hiring in

• Find hidden skills that are needed for projects

• Staff using skills rather than depending on relationships

Three Big Decisions

The three decisions that frame a skill and competency program are

1. Top Down or Bottom Up

2. Big Bang or Successive Waves

3. One Model or Many Models

These decisions should only be made in the context of your cascading choices and after you have picked the use case you want to start with.

Top Down or Bottom Up

Will you begin with a formal definition of the competencies, perhaps by adopting one of the Open Competency Models, or will you begin by inviting your people to work with each other to identify skills.

Big Bang or Successive Waves

Some companies elect to roll out skill and competency models to the entire company at once. Others move by business function, geography or even community of practice.

One Model or Many Models

Some organizations choose to have one model for the entire company. Others allow different parts of the organization to have their own models. Even when one chooses the One Model approach you should consider a skill and competency management platform that can support multiple models. You will need some small special purpose models from time to time and if you are interested in looking into the future of work you will likely need different models to support each scenario.

For more details on implementing your competency management system, you might find our post on how to build a competency model useful

A major skill and competency management program will change your company for the better. People will be more engaged and effective. Teams will be built based on the skills needed and not just on who is available and who knows who. Leadership will be able to answer the key business questions that they are accountable for to their boards and stakeholders.

• What skills are available to our organization?

• How are these skills being applied?

• Do we have the skills we need to meet today’s goals?

• Will we have the skills we need to meet tomorrow’s goals?

• Are there hidden pockets of potential we can deploy?

• Who are the critical people on our team?

• What skills are driving high performance?

Ibbaka Posts on Competency Models and Competency Frameworks

• Competency models as learning plans

• From user experience to competency model design - Margherita Bacigalupo and EntreComp

• Competency framework designers on competency framework design: Jeff Griffiths on transversal and vertical skills

• Competency framework designers on competency framework design: The chunkers and the slice and dicers

• Competency framework designers on competency framework design: Victoria Pazukha

• Two podcasts on competency model design from Vancouver

• The A in KSA is for Abilities or Attitudes or Attributes?

• Do competency frameworks need competency definitions?

• Should you have a personal competency model?

• Designing a skill competency model - the Ibbaka approach

• Design research - How do people approach the design of skill and competency models?

• Designing a blueprint for your competency model framework

• From competency model design to competency model generation

• The WEF on Building a Common Language for Skills at Work

• Aligning skill and competency models with microcredentials - a conversation between Don Presant and Kul Sharma

• Three Metaphors for Skills and Competencies

• The Skills for Career Mobility - Interview with Dennis Green

• Competencies or skills - what should you assess?

• Lessons Learned Launching and Scaling Capability Management Programs

• Designing a Competency Model for Innovation Coaches

• Talent Transformation - A Conversation with Eric Shepherd, Martin Belton and Steven Forth

• Who cares about skill and competency models

• Competency Model Definitions - the IEEE ups its game

• Competency Models Made Easy - Two Simple Spreadsheets to Build Your Own Competency Models

• Simple (very simple) skill and competency models

• Individual - Team - Organizational use cases for skill and competency management

• Design decisions for developing a competency framework (this post)

• What is skill management?

• Competency models are living documents and need curation

• Some key use cases for competency model adoption

• Designing the Open Competency Model Architecture

• A third skillscape

• Building skill and competency models together

• Getting past competency model PTSD

• Co-creation of Competency Models for Customer Success and Pricing Excellence

• Competencies for Adaptation to Climate Change – An Interview with Dr. Robin Cox

• Architecting the Competencies for Adaptation to Climate Change Open Competency Model

• Introducing open competency models

• Integrating Skills and Competencies in the Talent Management Ecosystem

• Organizational values and competency models – survey results

• Why your job architecture needs a competency model

• Are values part of your competency model?

• How to build competency models

• A skill name is just a word, isn’t it?

• Current trends in skill and competency management

• Enabling internal mobility - a design thinking approach