Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.

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Without skill and competency models tailored to their strategies organizations will struggle to achieve their goals. These models set out the skills and behaviors needed for performance and connect them to jobs, roles, tasks and even goals and values.

These are not the dreary old models of the past, where external experts came in and applied their perspective on the organization of work. A modern skill and competency model is a dynamic data structure that is used as a lens to find the people with the skills needed to execute a strategy. A well designed model contributes to resilience, adaptation and effectiveness.

A winning skill and competency model will be designed for and evolved with your organization and be aligned with its strategy. They are part of a larger set of designs that are meant to evolve over time.

So how does one approach the design of such models? This is the theme of a new design research project being led by David Botta. He introduces this work here. Watching David prepare this research has led me to think more about Ibbaka’s own approach to competency model design and how to improve it.

Design thinking approaches apply to skill and competency models.

Design thinking can mean different things in different contexts (Ibbaka manages the 166,000 person design thinking group on LinkedIn and participates in many of the conversations in the field) but at its core it means to take the best practices and patterns from the design disciplines and to apply them in a systematic and repeatable manner.

At Ibbaka we combine two of the standard design thinking frameworks to guide our work, Roger Martin’s Strategic Choice Cascade and the IDEO Design Thinking Process.

This is a simplified example of a concept blend. See Mark Turner’s work for more on this powerful way to generate designs.

The strategic choice cascade puts the model in its strategic context and focuses it on the key choices that will make the model relevant and effective. We find this approach so powerful that we have created a tool to help you do this. Download the Strategic Choice Cascade for Talent.

The strategic choice cascade helps us put the competency model in the context of the goals and to frame the design as a series of choices.

The IDEO design thinking process does two key things for us. The emphasis on Empathy reminds us to think about all of the different users of the model. The Ideate-Prototype-Test cycle keeps the development process agile.

The users of a competency model will depend on the goals and the model’s use, but we always consider the following:

Individuals - who want to improve their performance and align their skills for current and future roles
Team Members - who need to understand each others skills and build the combined skills needed for the team to achieve its goals
Managers - who need to make sure their part of the business has the skills needed and to support their reports in their growth and career aspirations
Learning Designers - who need to create the learning and performance support to build skills
Recruiters - who hire in people with needed skills
Executives - who want to make sure the organization has the skills need for its current strategy and to prepare it for the future

Our competency model design work generally falls into the following areas of activity

Goal alignment

This is where Roger Martin’s work is so powerful. We work with all of the stakeholders listed above to ensure goal alignment. One way to do this is with user stories, which take the following format (based on Behavior Driven Development approaches).

As [role]

At a [organization]

I need to [the what]

So that I can [the why]

This is not enough to get to empathy though. One needs to uncover the hopes and aspirations as well as the fears and trepidations of each user when it comes to the use of the model.

Performance Context for a Skill and Competency Model

One of the more interesting things to come out of the IEEE 1484.20.2 work on Recommended Practices for Defining Competencies is the notion of a ‘performance context.’

A competency is defined as “the set of skills and behaviors required in the performance of a task or activity within a specific context.”

Clarifying the ‘performance context’ is becoming a big part of competency model design. What is the performance context?

At one level, it is the job or role where the competency is demonstrated and the task or activity the competency is applied to. But this is not enough.

It can also include the tools and information needed for performance, and even more importantly the emotional and social context in which the performance takes place. If a person fails to demonstrate a competency in a specific context it can be because they were discouraged from doing so.

The Model

A competency model is a formal data structure. Today, these data structures need to be machine readable so that they can be used in all of the different contexts needed. We share more on the model we have designed for Ibbaka below.

Connections

Competency models connect to many other things. Defining those connections and how they will be supported is part of the design process. Some connections to consider are

Team Requirements and Project Plans
Job Architectures - Skill and Role Descriptions
Learning Plans - for the individual
Curriculums and Micro Credentials - for the learning designer
Career Paths - for both the individual and the organizational designer
Hiring Plans - for recruiters
Bodies of knowledge - many competency models include the knowledge needed for a discipline, and these bodies of knowledge are themselves changing
Psychographics - the psychological characteristics associated with different competencies can be critical to realizing potential

Feedback

Feedback in important during the design process but also once the model is live in the field and needs curation (or as we prefer to say, gardening). It is important to design in feedback loops as part of the model. Some of the feedback loops that need to be considered are

From the users (all of the users)
From performance outcomes (is the model describing what is actually needed to drive performance)
From outside the system (these are the most difficult feedback loops to design in, ask what is happening outside the space of the model that will lead to change)

Open design for skill and competency models

One of the most important developments in design thinking over the past few decades is the recognition that designs are not static but evolve with use. One of the roots of this recognition is Stuart Brand’s wonderful book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built.

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Skill and competency models need to be able to learn. If they are static they lose relevance. One reason competency models have such a bad reputation (see Getting Past Competency Model PTSD) is that they are generally out of date.

There are four common strategies to keep designs open.

Parametric Design defines a set of parameters that can be varied to create a family of designs. See The Elements of Parametric Design by Robert Woodbury (Rob was David’s Ph.D. advisor).

Design Spaces are related to parametric design in that they define a set of possible designs and algorithms for exploring the space and choosing the design with the best fit.

Design Patterns sees design as the combination and recombination of existing patterns and is closely related to modularity and reusability. See Design Rules Volume 1: The Power of Modularity by Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark.

Evolutionary Design takes the mechanisms of evolution such as mutation, transfer, recombination, expression and selection and uses it to provide mechanisms for change. See our post Three Metaphors for Skills and Competencies.

The Ibbaka Process for designing skill and competency models

Here is a simplified outline of our own design process. The complete process will be documented in an upcoming white paper.

Establish context
Set Goals and Get Alignment
Establish the Performance Context
Research the Current Skills of Top Performers
Map How People Work Together
Review Adjacent Skill and Competency Models
Establish the Architecture (Framework)
Develop the Content
Review the Content
Use and Revise the Content
Establish a Curation Process
Open an Evolutionary Process

The Ibbaka Framework 2.0 for Open Competency Models

We have applied this approach to the architecture of our own Open Competency Models.

Open Competency Models are open in three ways:

They are available under a Creative Commons license
They can be combined with other competency models
They are open to evolve in response to changes in the environment and new ways of doing work

Ibbaka’s first three Open Competency Models are for Design Thinking, Pricing Expertise and Customer Success. The updated versions of these three models will be available for everyone to use in May, 2021.

Ibbaka will host competency models made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike License or CC BY-NC-SA for no charge.

We have settled on the following components for our own Open Competency Models (you do not have to use this framework, the only requirement for hosting is that the model be available under Creative Commons, if you need more control, you can have model hosted for a fee).

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Jobs: We include Job descriptions in our skill and competency models. We do this as an anchor as many people and organizations continue to think in terms of jobs and having some example jobs gives contect. We do not try to be exhaustive here. Just give a few examples. Most organizations will develop their own job descriptions.

Roles: Roles come in three flavors, Job Roles (used to build Jobs), Team Roles (used to build teams) and Ad-Hoc Roles (for all that work people do ‘off the side of their desk). Roles play a pivotal role in Ibbaka’s Open Competency Models and we often start with a task and activity analysis to help us define roles.

Behaviors: Behaviors are defined by the IEEE1484.20.2 standard as one of the must have parts of a competency model. It defines them as follows: ‘“Behavior” is the way someone acts in response to a particular situation or stimulus.’ Identifying behaviors helps put the work in context. We include Attitudes as part of behaviors as the attitudes are shown in the behaviors.

Skills: Ibbaka uses skills to include both skills and knowledge. They are the atomic element of our approach and provide the connections between skills and skill categories support our approach to skill AI. Skills are classified as Must Have, Should Have, Nice to Have and an expected level of expertise (from 1-5) is set.

Credentials: We look to support credentialing and micro credentials in our work and to align the various open badging platforms. See Aligning skill and competency models wirth microcredentials.

Learning Resources: Providing access to learning resources of all kinds makes the model more useful. Thinking through the different kinds of learning resources that will support an understanding of the skill and how to apply it in practice can help inform the model itself. There is a positive feedback loop between learning and competency and between learning design and competency model development.

Design research on skill and competency models

This completes our overview of the Ibbaka approach to the design of skill and competency models. This is just one approach in a rich and rapidly evolving field. If you have you own approach to the design and curation of skill and competency models we would like to talk with you. Contact us at info@ibbaka.com. The Ibbaka Talent platform is being developed to support and to celebrate a diversity of approaches.

Contact us to work on your skill and competency models

Ibbaka Posts on Competency Models and Competency Frameworks

Competency models as learning plans

Designing a skill competency model - the Ibbaka approach