Many organizations are turning to competencies to align their employees’ skills & behaviors with their goals & provide a competitive advantage.

Putting the right people in the right positions for success, and measuring their performance and effectiveness over time is a key factor that separates the winners and losers in business today.

And make no mistake, a competency-based approach can be extremely effective... when developed and implemented correctly.

Why You Need to Do Competencies Right:

The Brandon Hall Group, a leading HR research and analysis firm, recently studied the impact of fully-optimized competency programs. They surveyed 449 professionals, spread across 57 countries and 36 industries. After collecting the data, they split the companies into 4 levels of “competency maturity”: casual, developing, standardized and optimized.

Companies at the optimized level were:

image credit: Brandon Hall Group

The key to unlocking these benefits is a fully-optimized approach to competencies.

And this is where most companies falter: only 8% of organizations who have a competency-based approach in place are at that optimized level, according to the study.

What Goes Wrong with Competency Projects?

There are a wide range of reasons why competency projects fail to make the intended impact on organizations. In our experience, some of the main causes of failure are:

• A lack of communication at all levels;
• Resistance to change internally;
• Failure to involve key stakeholders;
• Loss of momentum, leading to projects dying on the vine;
• Lack of required training/internal knowledge;
• Inadequate project management.

While these are common issues when dealing with some competency providers, they can be overcome, and competencies can provide major benefits across your organization; your human resources team and stakeholders just need to be equipped with the right tools, knowledge and guidance to drive success.

That’s where we come in.

The HRSG Advantage

With 28 years of experience, we’ve seen it all, and have a solution to fit your needs: whether your organization is large or small; whether your team consists of competency beginners, or experts looking for a change. Here’s a sampling of how HRSG helps you be more effective and more efficient when implementing and managing competencies:

• Implement HRSG’s off-the-shelf competencies, developed by subject matter experts and backed by nearly 30 years of research and development, or customize them further to fit your company’s specific needs.
   
• Pull from our extensive library of 300+ job profiles, industry-tested and trusted by hundreds of organizations.
   
• Utilize our ever-growing collection of 500+ behavioral and technical competencies to identify both the behaviors and technical skills that are required for employee success in their roles.
   
• Use our 5-level competency system, which provides unmatched detail and insight into the skills and behaviors your employees need to flourish in their roles.
   
• Rely on the experience and knowledge of our professional services team, the competency-based management experts who can help ensure success with competency framework, development, profiling and implementation.
   
• Bring all your competencies and profiles together in one place with our industry-leading CompetencyCore software – the hub of your competency initiative.

Want to learn more about using competencies? Get started with our Competency Toolkit:

Download your Competency Toolkit using the form below.

Post last updated: June 27, 2019.