Designing a blueprint for your competency model framework

Written By Steven Forth

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

Many organizations are starting or renewing their skill and competency management strategies.

A number of things are nudging people in this direction …

  • The need to adapt business models along with the post-Covid shift from resilience to adaptation

  • Demands from employees who want to understand what skills to develop to future proof their careers

  • Pressure for better performance from mission critical teams and the realization that it is skill combinations rather than individual skills that drive performance

  • The general buzz accompanying recent announcements on skills from the World Economic forum, the IEEE and many other government and standards organizations

There can be a temptation to go big on skills. Skill and competency management have the power to change performance and unleash potential. At Ibbaka, we call this the ‘Big Bang’ approach. Skills touch so many parts of the organization it is hard to know where to start, so one strategy is to grab the bull by the horns and start everywhere. This could even work, with a deep leadership commitment and a passionate and capable team to execute, but be careful.

Before we dive in, here are two tools that can help you with this work.

Big Bang or Small Catalyst?

Big bang approaches can end with a whimper. It is easy to get bogged down in designing competency models and job architectures and connecting them to multiple systems. This can take years to fully implement, by which time the ground has shifted, and executive sponsors will have lost patience without early results.

A different approach, one more likely to succeed in many organizations, is to start small. Choose a specific competency model, designed for one community, get that connected to people’s skill profiles, and learn what works. One can then use the competency model developed as a template for other models and other communities within the organization.

Starting small has its risks though. Too often, the competency model developed for the pilot program is not a good foundation for a more general approach. This can happen for several reasons.

  1. The model is for a highly specialized domain that has its own categories and concepts

  2. The model is so general and high level it becomes banal and has little impact

  3. The model covers skills that have no impact on the business

  4. The model is rooted in past practices and does not show the way forward

  5. The model is set too far in the future and is difficult for most executives to relate to

We are looking for a Goldilocks model here (not too hot, not too cold, not too big, not too small).

What does a good candidate look like?

  • The skills and competencies are currently used to do real work

  • The skills and competencies are used in combinations on teams (this will give much deeper insight into skill dynamics than purely individual skills)

  • The discipline for the competency model is changing, but not changing too fast (Goldilocks again)

  • There is a critical mass of people in the organization interested in the skills and already applying them in their work (critical mass will be between 50 and 300 people depending on the organization and model)

Extensibility and Scalability

As you design a competency model template (or architecture or framework, the terms are used interchangeably at different organizations) the two critical considerations will be extensibility and scalability. These concepts come from software architecture.

Extensibility is

is a measure of the ability to extend a system and the level of effort required to implement the extension. Extensions can be through the addition of new functionality or through modification of existing functionality. The principle provides for enhancements without impairing existing system functions.

Scalability is

the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources to the system.

How do these apply to competency models?

Extensibility and modularity

A competency model is extensible when it is easy to fit new skills and competencies into the framework. This is not always as simple as it seems. Sometimes a new competency will overlap with an existing competency and it is not always clear how to square the circle. This is especially true when there are already people who have claimed or been assessed on one of the competencies.

An example we are seeing a lot these days are design thinking and service design.

There are many connections between the two competencies (I call them competencies rather than skills as both are best understood as collections of skills and behaviours, and there is more than one way to be competent in either of these disciplines). People also have very strong opinions on this. The following quotes are harvested from the LinkedIn Design Thinking Group, which Ibbaka manages.

“Service design has replaced design thinking in most important applications.”

“Design thinking is the general approach, service design is just one application.”

“Service design and design thinking have their own histories, concepts and communities and should not be confused.”

“Design thinking and service design share many of the same concepts and apply similar tools, there is a lot of crossover, a person proficient in one is likely to be proficient in the other.”

Fortunately there are well established approaches from modular systems to managing these challenges. A good competency model architecture will be modular and it will be possible to apply the six modular operators to its components. These six operators are …

  1. Create a competency

  2. Delete a competency

  3. Divide a competency

  4. Combine a competency

  5. Replace a competency

  6. Invert the inheritance in your competencies

Test your architecture by applying these six operators and making sure that models built in this framework do not break apart and lose coherence.

(If you are interested in learning more about modular architectures and modular operators, the book Design Rules Vol.1 The Power of Modularity by Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark)..

Scalability

Scalability complements extensibility. It is the ability to add more people, more learning resources, more teams, more, more, more to your competency model.

You cannot do this with a spreadsheet, Powerpoint or PDF. If your competency model is locked into one of these formats it is not scalable.

To test scalability, try the following experiments.

  1. Add 100 competencies. Can people still navigate and find what they are looking for?

  2. Share the model with 100 people for input. Are you able to organize the feedback and act on it?

  3. Distribute the model to 1,000 users. See how they would assess themselves on the competencies. What will you do with that information?

Long term, the competency model will need to live in some form of competency model management system. In all likelihood, it will need to be integrated with other systems. You may not want to start with integration, but you will want to plan for it.

So ask the following

  • What information (metadata) do I need to include in my model to support scaling?

  • What are the integration points I need for my model and will it be easy to expose these as APIs (Application Program Interfaces) or export them for granular data integration (JSON is emerging as the most popular format for this).

Do not begin with heavy systems

Given the future need to scale and to integrate, many people are tempted to lean on an existing system for this work. This is generally a bad idea. The systems considered tend to be one of the following:

  • The core HRIS (Human Resources Information System)

  • Talent Management System (TMS)

  • Learning Management System (LMS)

These systems are often considered as some sort of integration with them will be desired down the road. There is also a lot of noise being spread by these vendors that they do, or will, provide some sort of support for skills, so you can rely in them and do not need a new system for skills. Test these claims carefully.

On close examination, these systems will fail on both extensibility and scalability. Most of them do not support a modular approach to competency model design and do not support or integrate with rich, social, skil profiles. They are known to be expensive and difficult to integrate with each other, especially when a new class of functionality is being layered on. Worst of all, relying on these systems will slow you down.

A good roll out of a skill and competency management program, and the associated competency models, should be agile and begin with a pilot or proof of concept. There is nothing agile about working with any of these systems. They have multiple stakeholders, are often managed though central, shared services, and require a lot of process (for good reason) to make changes.

Begin with an independent system that will allow you to move quickly and gather the data you need to evaluate the pilot.

Once you have delivered value, understand your community, designed a template and identified integration points, then you will be in a better position to make long-term commitments.

A guide to success

Here are a few simple things you can do to make sure your competency model blueprint can actually serve as a blueprint.

Develop the template as part of a pilot program that tests the use of competency models in your organization.

  1. Define the value (a pilot or proof of content should deliver value on its own terms)

  2. Start small (but not too small)

  3. Pick a focus that matters (you won’t get useful feedback if people don’t care about the content)

  4. Have a system (managing all this in spreadsheets, or worse Powerpoints) will make it impossible to gather the data

  5. Engage your community to get buy in and feedback, you will need them later on

  6. Expect to change - the pilot is meant to be a learning exercise and the learning will lead to change

The competency model template (or architecture or framework) needs to be extensible and scalable.

  • To be extensible is to be modular, test what happens when you apply the six modular operators

  • To be scalable is to have a formal representation in a system (the pilot system does not have to be the final system)

Ibbaka Posts on Competency Models and Competency Frameworks

Steven Forth
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