In this excerpt HRSG’s ebook, Engaging and Developing Talent with Competencies, we will review how career development can move the dial on a wide range of high-priority business areas.

Competency-based development benefits the organization as well as the individual. It enhances engagement and retention by giving employees greater career mobility and more control over the direction their career takes.

Using competencies as the building blocks of your organization’s development program also enables you to gain a clearer view of your organization’s talent resources.

When your talent inventory is defined by the jobs people perform, you’re only getting half the story. Until those jobs are defined by the competencies that define on-the-job success, it’s almost impossible to see which performers could be transitioned to hard-to-fill or soon-to-be vacant positions.

When you quantify gaps at the job level rather than drilling down to the level of job-specific competencies, it’s much harder to quantify the talent you already have and visualize how it can be developed and redeployed within the organization to address those gaps.

With competencies assigned to every job, and development opportunities assigned to every competency, analyzing the organization’s talent and developing it in ways that align with organizational goals or emerging needs becomes much easier.

Now let’s look at how competencies plug into an organization’s development activities.

Each job in the organization is defined by a competency-based profile. These profiles are made up of a list of competencies expressed at specific proficiency levels. With competency-based career planning, each proficiency level is connected to a selection of development opportunities.

Employees can see their own job profiles and any other job profile in the organization—from entry level to leadership across every division—and they can explore the learning and development pathway required to achieve various levels of proficiency in a given competency.

This makes the process transparent and accessible. Every employee can clearly see the skills, traits, experience, and knowledge required for any job. They also have a clear understanding of what their own competencies are, and can evaluate their readiness to take on a new role.

Most importantly, they can also explore the development pathways that can lead them from where they are to where they’d like to be.