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

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Skill and competency models are generally seen as organization tools. They are how organizations bring structure to the confusing welter of skills that exist in the wild. The most common use cases are things like defining the skills needed for job roles, team roles and ad-hoc roles, career path development, skill gap identification, selecting people for roles or building teams. Certifying organizations use these models to set out certification requirements. Educators use them to inform curriculums. All of these are important and are required as we build for the new world of work, where both individuals and organizations need to be more resilient and adaptive.

Good competency model designers put the individual front and center of their work. Using a design thinking approach. They begin by empathizing with all of the users of the model and think about the emotional impact adoption of a competency might have.

We have written about our own approach to competency model design here.

This is part of a larger piece of design research into how competency models are developed and applied.

But is this enough? And is the organizational, educational or societal lens the only way to think about and use competency models?

Why have a personal competency model

The future of work suggests that we each need to take responsibility for our own careers. We cannot rely on the organizations we work for for to develop the skills we need in the future. A personal competency model is a tool each of us can use to plan the skills we need to develop to achieve our goals.

Like most competency models it can go beyond skills. Organizational competency models often map to organizational constructs like jobs and job roles, desired behaviors and even tasks and activities.

A personal competency model can include many things other than skills. One example is relationships. What kind of relationships do you want to develop over the coming years? Another may be something as open exploratory as experiences. Are there experiences that you want to make sure you have over the course of a career, like starting a company, taking a new product to market or mentoring a person with more talent than you can ever have (one can learn a lot by working with very bright people who are early in their careers).

A personal competency model is both a planning tool and a way to organize your experiences and to celebrate your success.

As a planning tool, a personal competency model can suggest the skills you want to develop, the credentials you may need in the future and the kinds of career experiences you are seeing.

As a way to organize your past, it helps you to see the deeper patterns in your work, to uncover potential skills that you may not know you have, and to suggest future roles. It connects past experience to future potential.

How to develop a personal competency model

One can imagine several approaches to developing a personal competency model. At Ibbaka, we tend to default to Roger Martin’s strategic choice cascade to help us frame strategic decisions, and a competency plan is a strategic document.

One place to start is with goals. In their book Creating Great Choices, Jennifer Riel and Roger Martin suggest creating a personal career mind map. We have gotten great insights from this, see Mind mapping career goals gives the insights needed for real collaboration.

This gives a good starting point, but it can be hard to get directly from goals to skills. I think there are two good ways to bridge the gap: roles and relationships.

What competencies will you need for the roles you want to play?

Roles are a powerful construct in organizational competency models. They can play an equally important role at the personal level.

Ask yourself “What roles do I play?” and “What roles do I want to play?”

These can go beyond conventional notions of career and cross over to the wider community roles you play. For many of us there will be more and more connections between our work and community roles as our work lives stretch out.

In may case, roles I play (or want to play) are

Company leader
Investor
Animator of new ideas
- In open games
- In pricing
- In skill and talent management
- In scenario planning
Community builder (there is big overlap between this and the other three roles above as community building is one of my modes of action)

One can then go to other people who play these roles and see what skills they have. Eventually we hope to have the Ibbaka Talent Platform support this by allowing people to share their roles and the skills they associate with their success in that role. But you will also want to have conversations with people successful in these roles.

What relationships do you need to achieve your goals?

One element of personal competency models that I have not seen in organizational models is relationships. Many roles require relationships to play well. Investors.need to know other investors (which is why angel networks are so important) and to know the people creating and helping to grow companies. Company leaders play a critical role in connecting people inside and outside the company (or at least that is an important part of how I play the role). And of course a community builder’s main job is to build connections between other people.

Ibbaka has a concept of complementary skills. These are skills that are seldom found within one person but that are multipliers for each other. A personal competency model could identify one’s complementary skills, and this would help one build relationships.

Your learning plan and a personal competency model

I have been maintaining a personal learning plan for many years. My own plan is built by connecting …

Life goals
Learning goals
Learning Resources
Evidence

This is a private document, or has been, but I comment on parts on my 2020 plan here.

Now that I am building a personal competency model I want to explore how the competency model and learning plan connect.

The simplest way to do this is to connect skills in the model to learning through learning resources. The skills to learning resources connection is going to be important, but I don’t think it will be enough. One wants to triangulate here, and I think the triangulation will be around goals, learning and skills. It is important to connect these.

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Competency models and alignment

One of the big lessons of the past six months has been the importance of alignment and competency models. Don Presant at Learning Agents (see the conversation between Don and Kul Sharma on some of the work we have been doing together) has led us to think about how to align competency models with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. We are now thinking about this as a general approach to connecting competency models to other things. Goals are an important part of this, but so are outcomes (think how a project may not achieve its goals yet have spectacular outcomes, or vice versa). Perhaps the most important thing to connect to a competency model, especially a personal competency model, is value.

What are your values?

Who do you share them with?

What roles will let you best live your values?

Personal competency models are very, well, personal, but they become powerful when parts are shared, and when they align us with our values.

If you are interested in this journey, let’s connect, and see how we would design our personal competency models.

Ibbaka can guide you on skill and competency model development.

Ibbaka Posts on Competency Models and Competency Frameworks

Competency models as learning plans

Should you have a personal competency model?