Competencies: Who is Running Them and Why

Donald H Taylor explores the recent return to popularity of ‘competencies’ and reveals that the way they are used today, shows the low level of priority given to training and development in organisations;
 
Competencies have recently returned to something like the popularity they enjoyed in the mid ‘90s.
According to the CIPD’s Trends in Learning and Development Survey in April, 60 per cent of UK organisations are using competencies, with 48 per cent of the remainder planning to deploy them within two years.

Last November, I chaired in London the sixth annual conference of users of one competency framework, SFIA, at the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. The Skills Framework for the Information Age is used by the Irish Computer Society, among others, as a standard for describing the skills of IT professionals.

Why do people use SFIA in their organisations? This is how the speakers described their reasons:

• to recognise abilities, release potential and optimise utilisation 
• to ensure people are in the right job
• to give people a plan to develop themselves within their role and beyond 
• to support assignment-based working and career development
• to raise the level of employee engagement
• to produce job descriptions that reflect reality

Learning and development (L&D) goals are on this list, but they are not the sole reason that this, or probably any, competency framework is deployed; neither were the deployments mostly done by the L&D function. The most likely people to take the lead were (in this case) the IT department, which uses the competencies operationally, followed by HR.

Why is that?

The most obvious reason is that deploying competencies takes effort across the board. It requires some work by line managers and employees in their already busy daily lives. Unless they can clearly see some benefit, these people will not get involved. When that happens, competencies become an academic exercise, produced centrally and used for a while by a few enthusiasts until work gets in the way and they are de-prioritized and then finally abandoned to the bookshelf. Which is why competencies died out in the late ‘90s, when paper-based competency assessment did little more than line consultants’ pockets.

For L&D professionals, this can be tough to understand. Isn’t personal development valuable enough in its own right for employees and managers to want to help with the deployment of competencies?

No. It isn’t.

Part of this is down to the way competency models are pitched to the organisation. Professor Tony O’Driscoll of North Carolina State University commented last year, on the ‘traditional competency model’, in unrelentingly damning terms:

‘The current competency model approach, that we apply as a matter of course within our profession, is clearly not focused on, or couched in, an opportunistic light. Instead, it is more about “let’s figure out what you suck at and make you work at that till you get at least average at it�: How will this approach drive insight and growth for both the worker and the enterprise?’

He’s right.  This is not how to sell competencies, and yet too often it’s exactly the way learning and developments are coupled to competency.

Yet, a well-implemented competency framework should be worth deploying for the L&D benefits alone. It provides a view of the required skills profile of the organisation, and an understanding of how far adrift the current skills profile is. The next step – establishing a training plan to bridge the gap – is invaluable.
That, however, is just seen as helping the L&D department do its job better; and the rest of the organisation couldn’t care less about that. Competencies or no competencies, they will still get their training, and they don’t care whether it matches strategic objectives.

The sad truth is that the way competencies are deployed today reveals the low standing of learning and development in many organisations. It shows that L&D is seen as a fulfilment function annexed to the organisation. Like a fast-food counter clerk, it is considered to be working well when it deals quickly with the orders it is given.

In contrast, the people who make things, and who make things happen, are the ones who will continue to use competencies on their own terms. Why? Because it enables them to do more, better. According to the list above, they want to release potential and optimise utilisation, to get the right person in the right job. Yes, they want to support development, but it is career development they wish to support. In other words, to ensure that individual learning and development opportunities match the current and future needs of the business.

It’s a sad day when something as central to learning as competencies lies in the hands of others.
Perhaps it’s time the L&D function started engaging with what the rest of the organisation is already doing.

About the author: Donald H Taylor is Chairman of the Learning Technologies conference and a non-executive director of InfoBasis Ltd and the Institute of IT Training. He blogs at www.donaldhtaylor.co.uk and can be contacted at donaldt@learningtechnologies.co.uk.

 

Donald H Taylor