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Competency framework designers on competency framework design: The chunkers and the slice and dicers

David Botta

David Botta leads Ibbaka’s design research. See his skill profile here.

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?

This installment summarizes the experiences of a person responsible for managing a large, legacy skill taxonomy (these can be found in many large organizations, although this is one of the largest).

Learn about Ibbaka’s Open Competency Model for Design Thinking

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?

Background

A large product development and services company has developed a framework comprising a skills taxonomy together with a job library. It is used in more than 30 tools and processes throughout the HR portfolio. It is deeply embedded, and has a long history.

 Having a common vocabulary across different talent-related programs and processes has enabled the initial objectives of supporting a global, on-demand workplace.  More recently, the attraction and retention of critical skills has been elevated as among the most essential HR contributions to business outcomes. 

Bev (a fictional name), with a 20 year background in HR, is now focused on evolving the framework to meet these new challenges.

What obstacles must Bev overcome on her journey?

Deeply integrated talent management is both a strength and a technical debt; evolution of the talent management system must not break any of the many integration points. The framework connects to recruiting, compensation, contract resourcing, job mapping and learning management. It is used for skill inference and skill gap analysis. It is used in an internal skills management platform primarily used by employees and secondarily by managers.

Bev aims to reduce the burden of curating the skills framework  and to keep it fresh. She expects AI and cognitive tools to help, but how AI and cognitive tools might be employed are nebulous while maintaining the many integrations of tools and processes is detailed. 

Describing how the use of AI and cognitive tools should be operationalized entails a steep learning curve for the small design team. Significantly, while the user needs are formed based on user research, articulation of exact solutions are required in order to win conversations about investment.

Bev also aims to enable a segmentation of employees based on the market scarcity and demand for skills. The scarcity and demand is expressed at the job level, but skills are what people take with them from job to job. There needs to be a crosswalk between jobs, this can only be done through the skills layer.

The two sides of the company -- the product portfolio and the services portfolio -- make use of the framework  in different ways. The product development people tend to be "chunkers", they want a framework that takes a lot of related concepts and makes them more consumable. On the other hand, the services people are in the "slice and dice" camp, they want to be very specific, where the difference between two jobs is a single skill. Historically, this dichotomy wasn't a problem. But now with the exposure of skills to support employee-centred career mobility, the disjointed experience erodes user confidence that the framework  reflects reality.

How does Bev plan to deal with the obstacles she faces?

"I am wandering around in the dark with a flashlight on this. ...  These problems are what pushed me to say that I need to open my aperture for insight."

Bev recognized that skills are a currency for the workforce. Dynamic capabilities may be applied to the skills layer while maintaining a stable jobs layer. She characterized her design move to choose the skill layer as the place to spend time and attention. This was driven by a convergence of different things: doing lots of research, reading and listening to podcasts, talking to vendors, and extensive user research. 

"My journey has been to do user research to define measures of success." It took her a year to conclude with confidence that the skills layer is where they need to focus. "And once I have cleaned that up I have a home that I can move people to that will allow me to address some of the problems of how we look at jobs etc."

No one is emotionally attached to how the skills layer gets governed, so there are few barriers-to-change at that level. Some people do not want to throw anything away or change things for fear of breaking something. But the expertise framework  must be  about the company's future, not the company's past.

When asked to what extent she approaches design as a form of learning, Bev talked about having to learn three languages: semantic technologies, how AI uses that kind of thing to solve problems, and the language HR professionals use around competencies and skills. By bringing these together she can tell a story about where the organization needs to go and why it matters.

"We have a massive amount of learning and self-education as part of solving this problem." Her team uses Design Thinking approaches, and they track their learning, both to report what it takes to get where they are going, and to have skills that they can take with them through life.

Pulling the threads together, Bev’s approach is to 

  1. Understand user needs

  2. Respect organizational dependencies

  3. Stay current with emerging best practices

  4. Focus on the more dynamic and easier to change skill layer

  5. Use design thinking to guide the process

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