3 steps for organizations who want to create competency-based learning

(Question posted by participant in Accelerating Learning Transfer webinar)

I'm going to assume that you have a competency model (capability model) for each job role or job family. And your competency model contains these things:

• A list of skills or tasks someone in that role should be able to do, grouped into competencies or task categories

• A list of behavioral examples that show what each skill or task looks like at various levels of proficiency

• A target level of proficiency for each skill or task

STEP 1
Identify your learning opportunities and assets (formal and informal) that are relevant to the skills or tasks in the model. Think out of the box. This is an inventory you’ll use for mapping. Another way you can think of this is learning curation. EXCLUDE anything unrelated to the model. 

STEP 2
Map your skills/tasks in the competency model to the learning opportunities for a job role or family. What you're mapping is the target proficiency's behavioral examples to the learning objectives of the learning opportunities. So if Task X has a target proficiency of 3 for a Mechanical Engineer, and level 3 has 4 behavioral examples, you want to map it to learning opportunities who have objectives that would cover the 4 behavioral examples. This may be 1 or 4, or anywhere in between. 

STEP 3
Fill the gaps. Propose a description of a learning opportunity you think would be required to close this skill gap if it existed. For example, if the task is to use a checklist, then the learning opportunity may be a job aid to be able to use that checklist. If it is a high level skill (analysis, synthesis, evaluation), you may propose something like a skill practice. You’re not actually creating those activities. Let people self-assess against your model first, know the demand and then prioritize build/buy/curate decisions.

More details at: http://webcasts.td.org/webinar/1791