Learn how the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) used CompetencyCore to help its members evaluate critical professional competencies, build development plans and identify areas for improvement.  

Focus: Driving career development with competencies

Challenges

The management accounting role is changing rapidly as finance groups become increasingly involved in the strategic growth and resilience of the organizations they work for. As such, accounting and finance professionals must continually seek to develop and expand their competencies (knowledge, skills, and abilities) in order to succeed in current and future roles.

“While IMA offers a vast portfolio of continuing education resources, we felt it was important to offer our members a method of assessing their competencies to identify professional strengths and areas for improvement,” says Deborah Warner, CAE, CPLP, and VP of IMA’s Education & Career Services team. In turn, members are better positioned to select educational opportunities most appropriate to them.

“We wanted to put them in the driver’s seat to understand where they are in their professional development,” explains Warner. “Where do they want to go? And how do they get there? From there, the educational opportunities that we offer go hand in hand to address specific skill deficiencies identified through the assessments either in their current position or for future job goals.”

Solutions

IMA selected HRSG’s CompetencyCore, an integrated competency-based assessment and
development tool, to help members evaluate critical professional competencies and build development plans that supported their desired career journey.

The process started by analyzing members’ job requirements, then building a detailed competency framework that identified the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed at various levels of financial and management accounting jobs.

Next, an HRSG facilitator helped IMA validate the competency framework with input from senior professionals in the accounting industry to ensure that the framework aligned to the needs of their membership.

“It was important to us to ensure we captured everything correctly,” explains Warner. “Did we identify the competencies correctly? Were they properly described? And were the behaviors associated with each competency level accurate?”

Once the framework was validated, IMA worked closely with the HRSG team to create CareerDriver®, a white-labeled version of HRSG’s CompetencyCore platform.

CareerDriver was built from IMA’s Management Accounting Competency Framework and populated with customized targeted, industry-specific career development tools. CareerDriver enables IMA members to assess their skill-sets, identify any gaps, explore new career paths, and create personalized development plans that help them realize their career ambitions.

“CareerDriver gives our membership the ability to measure themselves against IMA’s Competency Framework, and to identify skill deficiencies for their current job, or future aspirational jobs,” says Warner. “It is a great tool to help financial and accounting professionals put their plans together.”

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Results

IMA now has an engaging and effective tool that enables members to manage their professional development more effectively. In the year since CareerDriver launched, nearly 1,300 IMA members have completed assessments, with 79% of those building development plans—participation numbers that surpassed expectations.

IMA has also been able to use the results of the assessments to identify skill areas where members are looking to improve professionally—information that helps IMA make more informed decisions about where to invest in additional course offerings and learning resources.

“The reviews of CareerDriver so far have been fantastic,” says Warner. “Anybody who uses it loves it, and they are impressed with how thorough it is. We are excited to keep promoting the tool and looking at different ways of leveraging the application.”

Learn more about the CareerDriver tool, click this link.

Post last updated: August 25, 2020