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Getting Past Competency Model PTSD

Steven Forth

Many people in HR are feeling beaten up by competency models, let’s fix this

I was recently in a meeting with the VP for people (a much better title than VP HR) to talk about open competency models. When we started talking about competency models, she rolled her eyes and said ‘I am recovering from competency model PTSD.’

I get it. I felt the same way a few years ago after having designed a number of large competency models for technology companies. Conventional competency models are big and clumsy. In systems integration, people joke that implementing an ERP is like taking your business processes and pouring concrete over them Competency models can do the same for HR. They provide a structure that gets in the way of change and adaptation. This is why the first version of our skill management platform did not have the functionality to support competency models. We believed, and still believe, that skills should bubble up from the people doing the work. Connecting skill to skill to people to projects to roles to jobs would, we believed, create a dynamic skill graph that would replace competency models.

We were wrong.

What is a competency model?

Traditionally it is a structured description of how Roles, Tasks, Behaviors, Competencies, Behaviours and Skills connect to Jobs. It is the muscle on the skeleton provided by the Job Architecture. As the muscle, it is the competency model that describes what people need to be able to do to get work done.

That doesn’t sound too bad. How could it provoke an extreme comment like ‘I am recovering from competency model PTSD?

Traditional competency models cause stress because they are rigid and top-down.

They are generally kept in spreadsheets and Powerpoint, and in the more advanced applications, they captured deep into relational databases. By the time they are developed they are already out of date and because they tend to be developed by HR working with expert consultants the people whose work they describe do not recognize themselves or their work in the model.

A few days ago I was listening to a guy on the radio talking about HR (A radio show where they were talking about HR!). He said ‘ HR tells me all about our corporate values and how we should work together. It doesn’t tell me anything about what I need to know if I am not going to drop a bridge on someone and kill them.’ Generic high-level skills and ‘soft skills’ do not usually help people do their work. They are designed for HR and not the people doing the work.

Still, it was a mistake on our part not to include competency models. Organizations need a way to guide people on the skills and behaviors needed for work. As they prepare for the future, they need to signal new skills that people will need and new jobs that will become available. People need to know what skills their organizations think they need and will need. We need to provide a skill gap analysis (I am working on one this weekend) because people need to know what they need to do to leverage up their own performance if they are going to take control of their careers. Competency models underlie curricula and learning paths and help people identify the many different career paths they could pursue. Done right, competency models enable change.

So how do we do competency models right?

  1. Competency models have to be top-down and bottom-up. Relying on just one approach fails. Bottom-up models alone do not give us the ability to shape our futures, they tend to become reactive. Top-down models are too rigid and too removed from real work. They block change.

  2. Competency models have to change as work changes. They need to be open to the skills bubbling up from the bottom. It has to be easy to add new tasks, roles, and skills. The users of the model need to play a role in changing the model.

  3. Competency models need to recombine. Evolution depends on the recombination of elements. An open competency model has to have swappable parts. If design becomes an important part of pricing (and we believe that is happening, see How to hire a pricing consultant), then one may want to plug parts of a design thinking competency model into a pricing expertise competency model.

That is just the mechanics though. For competency models to have value they have to be used and used not just by HR or learning and development, but by the people whose work they claim to describe. This is the number one rule of competency model design.

We describe building competency models in detail in a post on how to build competency models

Make the model useful to the people doing the work

How can a good competency model help people? It needs to help me

  • Find the work I could do, today and in the future

  • Find the skills I need to do the work

  • Help other people with their own work and development, and then they will help me

These are not easy to do and I can’t say we have totally achieved them. But this is what we are trying to do and who we are designing for. In a world of rapid economic and demographic change, people need tools to help them take control of their own careers. Doing this will help the companies they choose to work for.

In a design session last Friday we were trying to come up with the terms we could use to describe skill gaps. A skill gap occurs when a person exceeds or falls below the skill requirements for a job. We started with some bland bureaucratic language (my fault).

  • Exceeds

  • Meets

  • Falls short

Does that send the message that people are in control of their own skills? Nope. Brent Ross, who leads our customer success function had a better idea. He suggested,

  • Leverage

  • Apply

  • Develop

See the difference? The first is descriptive and implies a judgment. The second set of terms uses verbs, is about how you put your skills to use, and what you can do. This is the direction we want to go.

Ibbaka Posts on Competency Models and Competency Frameworks