Competency framework designers on competency framework design: Jeff Griffiths on transversal and vertical skills

Introduction

Competency frameworks (or models) are carefully designed for human consumption. This article is part of a series on how people in this discipline go about their design process. What are their problems, approaches and goals?

The final article in the series will be a comparative summary. Ibbaka expects to provide a broad understanding of the discipline for everyone's enjoyment and to inform the design of the Ibbaka Talent Platform.

Read more about our design research here: Design research - How do people approach the design of skill and competency models?

Learn about Ibbaka’s Open Competency Model for Design Thinking

Jeff Griffiths

Becoming a Certified Management Consultant who specializes in strategic workforce and organizational development with WorkForce Strategies International was a natural move for Jeff Griffiths because of his nearly 20 years with the Canadian Military. Jeff explained that the military is good at training; that is, trying to understand what competency is for both individuals and collectives, and building frameworks to specify what they are looking for to build skill sets and competencies that they need to do their jobs.

"Training and development is not something you do in the military for a living, it’s something you do while waiting to go back to your real job. What that ensures is there is always fresh operational thinking in the training department because people come straight out of ops and train and instruct for a few years then go right back to ops."

WorkForce Strategies International works with everything from small businesses to industry associations and sector councils, creating frameworks that connect occupations across entire industry sectors. Their approach is, when someone wants to figure out what’s important at a role level, they start with “what does success look like?”; what is the output of the work, and build from there. Jeff contrasted this with the more usual development training approach, which does not suit managing performance on the job.

"If I am supervising someone, how do I know they are doing their job right? What does that look like? What are the component pieces of that?"

Their approach includes articulating competencies that are portable across occupations. Jeff gave the example of a manufacturing plant where millwrights, electricians, instrument mechanics and possibly mechatronics technicians all work with PLCs. The competencies for working with PLCs are portable across those occupations.

"You can break these things down to the molecular or atomic level, whatever makes sense for recruiting, hiring, onboarding, training ... for ongoing development. We always start from the point of view of ‘who has to manage this person in the field’."

When projects are initiated by companies, as opposed to an industry association, normally it starts with HR then becomes a blend of HR and Operations. The initiative has to be driven from the top of the organization or it will never happen. But front line management and the incumbents who do the work have to be involved in the creation of it.

"The most important is probably the first level of supervision. Because they have a perspective on what ‘good’ looks like. ... Often they can even have a better perspective on that than the people who are actually doing the work." The stakeholders generally have no problem coming into alignment.

WorkForce Strategies International will define the outcomes for a department and break that down to its individual pieces. There is usually very little argument about what those outcomes should be. This approach contrasts with how industry associations or sector councils approach competency, as they attempt to take a broad view of the industry. That means creating a model that is inclusive of the many differing sub-sectors within the industry, as well as the differences in sizes and specializations of the firms in the industry, none of whom do exactly the same thing in the same way. This makes industry-level frameworks much less specific than one that is constructed for a particular organization.

The consultants at WorkForce Strategies often work independently on different aspects of a project, but at the beginning they will come to agreement about the architecture and what good looks like, depending on the situation. Then they will work individually, building to that framework, and come together periodically to make sure they are all on the same page. Smaller jobs are often done by one consultant.

They have a philosophy about what these things should look like: useful, usable, and sustainable. They have a construct around the way these frameworks should go together, things like an occupational profile, a competency statement, and how competencies change going up in complexity within an organization.

There are some basic principles, but you have to build these things with a kind of flexibility to accomplish what the companies or end users will need to do. Their basic module is the competency statement. The style of competency statement that they find most useful focuses on the front line: uses what, to do what, for what? What are the measurable components of performance? But the design of the many pieces and how they fit together embodies a kind of flexibility. The boundaries between different levels of complexity of work are fuzzy, as are different levels of proficiency. What company A thinks is the minimum required standard may represent “superstar” performance at company B – there is flexibility in the interpretation of the construct. "For me this is the thing that’s cool, is understanding the fuzziness around the system that is the organization and how all these competencies interact with each other in order to achieve whatever the organization is setting out to achieve." At higher levels of complexity people have to think, interact, create and adapt.

Organizational flexibility enables a phenomenon where,

"You can have two excellent middle managers in a firm, even in parallel departments, a plant manager at plant X and a plant manager at plant Y that produce the same product and both of them be successful, but both have very different underlying skill sets. Why? Because the environments are different, the people are different. You can swap them, and they might both fail, because of the complexity of organizations and the interactions between all of the components in an organization. It’s the embodiment of a ‘complex adaptive human system’, the way individual and collective competencies influence and interact with each other in the overall structure and environment of an organization. I’m fascinated by that, and it’s what drives me and keeps the work I do interesting and amazing."

Not only do competency frameworks have to be updated with new information, but philosophical approaches to them evolve as well. “What ‘good’ looks like is also a moving target.” For example, while a traditional DACUM (Develop A Curriculum) works really well for capturing technical and vocational types of work, it doesn’t do so well at capturing “professional” work. Using DACUM, it is necessary to look at all the tasks that, say, a medical doctor may have to perform. But at a certain level of complexity it is not just what you will do but even how you will do it or even whether you do it at all, and the number of bodies of knowledge that you have to take into account when making these complex decisions. Jeff applied the 2017 European ComProCom (competency for professionals) approach to better articulate competence for management consultants.

The competency design approach of first determining what doing it right looks like is an example of evolution of the approach itself. It has a broader perspective than a task-by-task approach, because the measurable outputs may actually involve multiple tasks.

WorkForce Strategies International’s approach is to measure performance on the job as it happens, nevertheless,

"You can always deconstruct these things (competency models) to create training and curricula and everything else. ... If you build them from the perspective of the end-user (the front-line manager), it creates more implementable, more operational, more useful documentation that can be used for managing performance and generating the kind of results the companies are paying for."

Jeff knows he is done writing a competency framework when it has captured the critical competencies that drive performance in the organization, at that level.

"Generally speaking, that is not a lot. ... You know you are done when what you have created is fit for purpose. Ideally as few things in it as required in order to be fit for purpose. ... You start as a draft then you work and edit and refine it until you are satisfied that it tells the story. You build something then you use it, you apply it. Does it work? No? What part of it doesn’t work? Let's fix that, let’s edit. These should be living documents. ... They will never be perfect. They just have to be perfect enough."

“Rigid frameworks inevitably fail when they hit change. Build for the fuzziness that you need in the framework. Recognize that it is required, it needs to be adaptable. All models are wrong, some of them are useful. They are all just a rough interpretation of reality that helps you understand it. Frameworks are just that. Frameworks are a mental model for how competencies organize themselves in order to accomplish something. There’s no one right way to do it. The right way is whatever works and solves the problem that you are trying to solve. Ideally if built in a way that it allows for flexibility and it is designed for growth and change you'll be more successful with it.”

Jeff is deeply concerned that people shouldn’t be restricted because of where they learn, how they learn, or when they learn. He gave an example of restriction from a city that straddles the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, Lloydminster:

"If you can explain to me – and I have said this in meetings with government people – if you can explain to me why I can be competent, qualified and credentialed on one side of 50th Avenue and a complete idiot if I cross the street, if you can explain to me why that makes sense I’ll shut up. ... We don’t have a recognized system of measuring and evaluating acquired competencies outside of a formal school system. ... If I’m a company that does business in multiple provinces, like a Suncor, or a CP Rail, or one of the banks – can you really effectively deal with five different apprenticeship boards and credentialing systems to move a millwright or a skilled technician from site to site across the country? Why do we even think this is a good idea? It’s a layer of inefficiency that the economy just doesn’t need."

Also, there is a social necessity to rapidly transition people into new work using as many of their existing skills as they can, filling in the gaps as necessary.

"Where you start shouldn’t have any bearing on where you finish, as long as you have the desire to get there, and the societal support to allow that to happen." By and large, skills and competencies are global, not regional.

"We still sit in our little provincial boxes here in Canada and say ‘well you can’t do that’." The key missing piece is a competency-based framework that recognizes people’s abilities regardless of where and how they learned how to do it.

Jeff pointed out that research by ESCO (European Commission: European Skills/Competences, Qualification and Occupations) indicates that about 30% of the competencies related to any given occupation are really unique to the occupation, there’s about 30% that are industry or sector specific, and there’s about 30% that anybody at that level in any industry needs.

"If you build a hierarchy of occupations based on the complexity of the work that they do you’ll find these common threads that connect all of them in terms of transferrable underlying foundational skill sets.

" Technology is making support for career mobility feasible – technology like Job Data Exchange (JDX), interoperable learning records, credential engines, open badging, and work done by the T3 Innovation Network and IMS Global --

"So individuals who have those competencies, companies that need those competencies and training providers who can generate those competencies can connect together."

In summary, some of Jeff’s challenges are

Capture the critical competencies that drive performance in an organization:
- Understand and reflect complex adaptive human systems, how competencies organize themselves in order to accomplish something
- Build competency frameworks with a kind of flexibility to accomplish what the end users will need to do
Encourage the development of a system for measuring and evaluating acquired competencies outside of a formal school system

His approaches are

Start with
- articulating what success looks like from the point of view of front-line managers
- defining the outcomes for a department, then break that down into its individual pieces

Competency statements focus on the front line: uses what, to do what, for what? What are the measurable components of performance?
Articulate competencies that are portable across occupations
Have a common understanding on how things like occupational profiles and competency statements go together so the team can agree on an architecture then work independently
Build for the fuzziness that you need in the framework
Aim for the framework to be useful, usable, and sustainable

Ibbaka Posts on Competency Models and Competency Frameworks

Competency models as learning plans