Competencies or skills - what should you assess?

If you’re responsible for any aspect of the talent management lifecycle, you know that people are talking about skills as the driving force behind their readiness to compete. It is by growing skills and finding new ways to apply them that companies (and individuals) become ‘ready’ for the future. You also likely have or have had questions about how skills should factor into your talent management practices, including assessment.

Competency models often specify levels of expertise for skills or competencies. By doing so, they create a need for assessment. But what to assess? Skills or competencies? Many organizations see this as an either/or choice. This post takes a look at the pros and cons of each, and why we might want to do both.

Despite the emergence of more agile forms of performance management, such as measuring performance against key objective results (OKRs) or through project team retrospectives, many organisations are blending these approaches. Although I’m focusing on the tension between competencies and skills, I believe that many of the points I will make about the assessing skills will apply to a similar tension that may exist with how to integrate OKRs and outcomes.

What is the difference between competencies and skills?

The simplest answer to this comes from Eric Shepherd at the Talent Transformation Guild.

“Competencies are skills in context.”

Context here means how the skills are being used, the other skills they are used with, and the behaviors and other considerations critical to their successful use.

Unfolding this, competencies, are a combination of skills, behaviours, and other things like domain expertise (knowledge) that allow a person to apply a group of skills applied to particular tasks to deliver a desired outcome.

Skills are more granular and fundamental. A skill can often be applied to (used in or be part of) many different competencies. At Ibbaka we use a metaphor from genetics to understand this. Skills are like genes. They are at the root of any competency. They get combined in many different ways to allow people to do work. Like a gene, one can have a skill, but because of the environment it does not get a chance to be expressed.

Assessing competencies - advantages and challenges

When it comes to assessment, competencies have advantages and disadvantages, depending on why a company is doing the assessment in the first place.

The advantages and challenges for assessing skills

A major difference between competencies and skills, is that skills can be repurposed across different jobs or roles, whereas competencies are often more job- or role-specific. This gives skill assessments some important advantages over competencies, but there are challenges as well.

Assessing skills may be unavoidable

For organizations that are seeking to adapt to their environment, and build resilience, skills are unavoidable. Competencies are too closely aligned to the current job architecture and work processes to support change.. One of the biggest reasons to assess skills is that the way in which we describe work needs to keep changing, because our work is rapidly evolving. The pace of change is picking up as disruptive technologies make their way into the mainstream and the structure of the economy changes. If you are looking to the future, your organization needs to begin developing fluency with the language of skills.

This doesn’t mean ditching your competency model. Here are some steps organizations can take towards getting the best of both worlds.

Identify must-have skills for the competencies in your model. This can help a competency model remain dynamic. The skills needed to successfully achieve competence in any area of a role or a job will change over the next five years, and in technical roles, they could need updating every 1 to 2 years.

Have team members identify the skills in the model most important to develop. Don’t focus on weaknesses. Encourage the development of skills that are already known to be strengths. You can even make these skill assessments the basis for assessing the competency.

Identify role- or outcome-specific skills that may not be captured in the model. Remember that each individual is likely to bring their own approach to their work, and want to leverage the unique strengths they bring to a role. Leverage this data to augment and evolve the model over time.

Enable peer and expert assessment for skills. Give employees the means to solicit feedback from the people they work with who share their skills. In many cases, the individual members of a team know who these people are. Research has proven that the best people to assess a skill are those who have the same skill and who are regarded by others as highly proficient in that skill. This is even more true when people work together on teams.

Combining competency models with the skills for the purposes of assessment requires thoughtful design when it comes to the overall model structure itself as well as the skills you choose to emphasize. This can be time consuming if you rely on a top down approach. Working from the bottom up, as well as top down, is the best way to ensure your organization is identifying the right skills to assess as market conditions and roles change over time.

Ibbaka Posts on Competency Models and Competency Frameworks

Competency models as learning plans