What is Competency Management and How Can It Help Your Organization?

Your human capital is the most valued asset when it comes to driving your organization forward. They are unmistakably your competitive advantage. Aligning people strategies to business goals is a cornerstone for any business's growth. If this alignment is a miss, organizations can lose out on excellent opportunities to attract the right talent which can adversely impact innovation, customer success, and growth goals. To strengthen this alignment, one way is to define competencies that are mapped to the business goals and are equally aligned to the employee’s role and responsibilities. Competency Management isn’t an alien term in the HR fraternity. In fact, it is getting traction in today’s competitive environment more than ever as it helps the HR professionals to attract the right talent and also retain them. It helps the HR teams to draw up a fair process of evaluating the talent pool.

So what exactly does Competency Management mean?
Competency management is a method of identifying key skills and expertise that an employee needs to have in order to achieve target performance and later managing and developing those skills and expertise so that they align with the organization’s overall goal. HR professionals can use a competency management framework to:

• Define the jobs and the skills required across the organization
• Assess the job-seeking candidates and the employees to evaluate how well their skills and expertise align with the job description
• Create training and development plans to close the skill gaps
• Monitor and measure to achieve employee, team, and business goals

How does Competency Management benefit your organization?
With the help of a Competency Management framework, you can not only identify and develop the necessary skills and knowledge required for individual positions but also have an impact on the organizational culture. A robust framework can assist with the following employee planning initiatives: 

• Workforce Development: By conducting a skill gap assessment, you narrow down on the areas of improvement which allows you to guide the employees about which training they need to take. Competency management helps you to realize the full potential of your training program by ensuring that the employees spend the optimal time on getting the correct training.
  
• Succession Planning: Competency Management plays an important role when it comes to facilitating a smooth transition from the senior executives to the next-generation leaders. It helps to identify and develop the necessary skills in the successor so that the organization is ready with a new leader. 
  
• Leadership Development: With the help of competency mapping tools like skill assessment, you can pinpoint the employees that have the leadership gene in them and are ready to take on those roles. You can provide them with relevant training and development plans to reinforce and elevate their leadership skills.
  
• Business Continuity Planning: The recent pandemic has taught organizations a very important lesson in being agile and adaptable to change in no time. Through Competency Management, you can identify those skills required in the employees that they can help them work under any circumstances at any given point during a crisis. 

How to best use the Competency Management data?
With the help of a robust Competency Management framework, HR professionals can assess the employees objectively, define the skills needed for the role, and assign the level of competency to achieve. This makes it easy for them to track behavioral change and plan any improvements if required. However, in order for the competency management activity to be as effective as possible, it's critical to collect the data.
A Learning Management System (LMS) is an excellent platform to track and analyze the progress of employees. HR teams can use the LMS to close the skill gaps and analyze the trends in data captured. With the help of an LMS, you can have your employees complete the eLearning courses assigned to them. HR professionals can then track employee-level data such as completion rates, assessment scores, user satisfaction through questionnaires and polls. HR teams can evaluate these data points that can be available in the form of graphs or charts, to see any huge data trends. Based on the information collected, they can then communicate to the employees how they have progressed and if there is a need to close any skill gaps for their position. The competency management data procured from the LMS is a valuable asset to advance short and long-term people development strategies.