What’s the difference between a Competency Model and Competency-Based Learning for a job role and job family?
If you create a competency-based model for a job family, or several similar roles, including entry-level individual contributor (IC) to director, they might share tasks but require different levels of proficiency.
As an example, if you built a sales model, an Account Executive might have to develop winning proposals at a level 3 – do it well and independently.
A Pre-Sales person may have to be a level 2, as they are in a supporting role and participate in the process but don’t need to do it independently.
A Sales Manager needs to be able to coach and mentor those building it, so they need to be a level 4.
And the Sales VP needs to be able to innovate the proposal process or define the proposal strategy, so they need to be at a level 5.
Some tasks may be unique, for example, only those who manage others will have people mgmt tasks. And because a competency model shouldn’t contain everything someone should do, but rather focus on “what is critical to success in that role”, the people management tasks may displace some IC tasks for managers/directors.
Whether a role has its own model or is part of a shared model varies by organization. If you have multiple levels that do the same thing but with different scope (e.g., one role manages a site, one a region, one a country), it is likely a job family, or even one role (with behavioral examples written to accommodate variations in scope).
When it comes to competency-based learning, you will likely recommend learning that will get someone to their target level (meaning the learning objectives help them perform the behaviors in that level). Using the previous example, you’d recommend an activity that would get a Pre-Sales person to a level 2 or even a level 3. But for the Sales VP, you’d recommend a different activity to get them to a level 5.
