Identifying individual competencies

Competencies provide a prudent way of matching individuals with organisations. They are highly accepted as a powerful scientific tool to plan and develop human resources.

As employment opportunities become less predictable, the competency approach could supplement effective human resource planning, and in some companies, replace traditional methods of manpower planning. How?

Today's businesses need people to excel in performance - not jobs, as building blocks of the organisation. Career development is more vital than job titles. Empowered work groups are more essential than hierarchical relations.

If the employees are not tied to the business process or if they are not engaged in a role of required competencies, the organisation becomes routine and free from achievement. Hence, attention is being paid to identify individual competencies required for the job and integrate it with HR systems.

The organisation structure should reflect the role competency model rather than depict the power and authority.

The role is more important than the job. The job is static, whereas the role is realistic and can be easily measured. Competency enables an effective role that makes the job meaningful.

For instance, what is the point of having a well-defined job description if the jobholder does not know what to do with it? People have to be developed who can really take up the role as described. People have to be rewarded who can add value to their job. So, the competency based model become essential in selection and retention.

A competency is defined as an underlying characteristic of an individual, which is casually related to effective or superior performance in a job. For instance, the need for achievement is a fundamental character of personality to enable an efficient organisation. Achievement motivation is the impetus for innovation.

In order to face ever-increasing competition, continuous improvement in quality is needed. If each member of the staff has such an achievement motive, the organisation will succeed even in difficult times.

In organisations, the positive behaviours - the in-built personal characteristics like motive, trait, knowledge - will enable a business process for action that becomes job performance.
Competencies are prepared by analysing the behavioural dimensions – a model will provide a simple way of assessing the candidates for job and avoid the risk of hiring the unqualified.

How can we build the competency models to strengthen the organisation? It can be built to integrate the human resource management (HRM) functions - recruitment and selection, career planning, succession planning and performance management.

To achieve such a model, we need to understand the core competencies needed for our business. Suppose we decide customer care is the core competency, we must search for individual behaviour that promotes effective customer care. To enable customer care role, what are the job and behavioural competencies required? Rapport could be one of the behavioural competencies and follow -up call for maintenance could be considered as a job competency.

For practical purposes, we can categorise competencies into behaviour and job competencies. While doing job analysis, we must ask the jobholders and managers what type of skills or behaviour enable effective performance?

Undoubtedly, we do often use generic competency dimensions in our system. Negotiation skills, energy, presentation, tenacity, technical and professional knowledge are considered to be the vital competencies for sales and marketing jobs.

Judgement, creativity, decisiveness and organisational sensitivity are considered for planning jobs. There are organisation-specific and job-specific competencies. The use depends on the context and business environment.


Pon Mohaideen Pitchai is a Dubai-based HRD consultant.