If you have multiple business units in your audience and you’re tasked with upskilling/reskilling people in all of them, how can you create competency models/capability frameworks that remain relevant and close skill gaps for each?

Keep them relevant

The most important thing to remember about competency models is that for them to be effective, they must be relevant. A competency model describes what each person in their role needs to be able to do, specifically, in order to perform their part of corporate strategy. If they are too generic, they will no longer be effective. That is, when using them to assess their own capabilities, they won’t drive accurate self-awareness, they won’t buy into any skill gaps, and they won’t motivate people to take action.

Include Skills of the Future which transcend jobs

That being said, there are some tasks and competencies that can be shared across roles and business units. These skills of the future are soft skills (or core skills), and according to research by McKinsey, the World Economic Forum, and LinkedIn they are growing in importance in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (digitization, automation, AI). These are the skills that transcend jobs, even those that don’t currently exist.

A recent World Economic Forum session further detailed that while it is undeniably important to be teaching how to design, develop or employ technology, higher ed is already good at teaching technical skills. It’s the non-automatable “human” skills (sometimes called “soft skills”, though we prefer “core” or “foundational” skills), that will continue to increase in value. These are things like adaptability, creativity, critical thinking, complex problem solving, and influencing. And those are the skills that higher ed is generally not adept at teaching, which is why you need to do it in the workplace.

You can’t learn them by watching videos or elearning.

You can only learn these skills of the future by DOING them. So when it comes to recommending the best personalized competency-based learning, you’ll need experiential learning (“70” in 70-20-10), like skill practices and projects.

Create competency models with shared skills

As we defined the competency models for individual roles, we’ve found that sometimes we need to customize the behavioral examples, while the competencies and skills remain the same. For example, “Influence and persuade others to drive action”.

When the competency model roles are similar across business units, (e.g., sales, engineers, finance, risk analysts), there are 2 ways you can choose to build the model.

1. You could include people across business units in the competency modeling workshops.

2. Or you could perform the competency modeling process with one business unit, and then validate it with the other business units, providing them with the opportunity to customize the tasks and/or behavioral examples.

We’ve done it both ways.

If time is of the essence, competency modeling approach 2 (build and validate) may be faster and easier. If the company culture has business units at odds, then being more inclusive at the front end is the way to go (competency model approach 1). A middle ground is to have the other business units validate the output of the Competency Model Rapid Job Analysis workshop, and then participate in the Competency Model Task Example editing and workshop.