Employee Competency management

Employee Competency management is a process that should be established to support business workflow of any company or organization in order to make sure that right persons occupy right positions. As far as usually business managers have to select the best candidate among several available ones, or decide on how to optimize rotations of their employees, or how to organize assignment of workloads for a better productivity, etc, the established Employee Competency management brings some science into this process to make it more impartial, and to decrease any subjective judgements or avoid some hasty decisions that can ruin the entire working process. Let’s consider different sub-functions and conceptions referring to it:

• Framework – this is a suitability criterion that should be defined for every position in the organization, this conception embraces not only formal education or skills which an ideal worker should possess in order to take this workplace, but also behaviours that employees must adhere, or must acquire, to achieve high levels of performance. In other words it is not only about duties of professionals, but it is also about sort of attitudes and behaviours the organization encourages and values when employees carry out their tasks;
• Profiling – this is a twofold process which works for elaborating the competency frameworks for all critical positions in organization (traits that an employer values and believes will help in achieving its long-term goals), and also undertakes ongoing job assessment in order of identification if the professionals who already occupy some business positions fully match these traits, or they need to acquire some important behaviours & attitudes to improve their performance (or if they totally mismatch these criteria, then they can be replaced by other more appropriate persons);

• Measurement – this is a process employing a complex of techniques and tools assisting the organization in determination if the already hired personnel, or candidates pretending to take some vacancies suit the pre-defined competence frameworks. This is defined through a series of personnel testing (all-round surveys, tests of technical skills, etc) that can help in discovering lacks and strengths of a personality subjected to examination in terms of different aspects. Besides this, evaluations can be done via analyzing employees’ actual results and productivity;

• Mapping – once your organization-wide Employee Competency analysis has been properly completed you can draw a map representing a situation within your organization, so that you can use it to learn what is the average or specific percentage which your employees match their current positions with, so that you can define the efficiency of your previous HR procedures and staffing policies (that underlies a current situation);
• Employee Competency Development – if any lack of competency is determined, the policy of competency increasing should be applied, allowing you to obtain a better overall efficiency in the entire organization. Usually this competence mismatching can be eliminated or minimized with a help of special trainings (while more radical steps are employee firing or rotation to a new place), but first of all it is necessary to discuss the problem with each worker individually and agree on possible ways of skill improvement, to estimate costs and ways to realize;
• Employee Competency examples: problem-solving skills, customer service skills, team skills, efficiency in interpersonal communications, knowledge of foreign cultures and languages etc;

Software that can be used in employee competency management:

VIP Task Manager is software that is not specifically designed for managing competency, but can be used for organization and controlling of the manpower in your organization (as well as other business resources such as premises, vehicles, equipment, etc). While job analysis & audit can be performed by some Employee Competency company (aka HR consulting company), ongoing organization and directing of your staff’s efforts are the tasks that can be facilitated by using VIP Task Manager – client-server software for assigning tasks to doers in real-time regime via LAN or Internet, reporting statuses of tasks, controlling progress and productivity, etc.