Skill and competency management lives in the context of the performance improvement cycle. This is a model we developed for one of our customers that wanted to see how all of the different parts of its learning and development programs fit together. We kept it simple and focused on the critical activities that most impact performance. Let's walk around the the outside of the circle and look at competencies, learning, performance support and measurement and then finish by looking at what performance actually means.

Competencies

These are the combination of skills, levels of expertise, behaviours and even attitudes needed to do the work. There are several ways to capture these. One can do this bottom up using a system like the current version of Ibbaka Talent. People claim skills, suggest skills to each other, rate each themselves and each other on skills and the system takes this activity to suggest additional skills. The skills can be organized into different categories and connected to roles and projects.

Alternatively, the organization can develop a formal skill or competency model that it shares with its employees. This top down approach is often organized into jobs, roles, behaviours and skills. Employees use the model to understand the requirements for their current job and other jobs that they may want to move into.

One can also use an automated system to build the skill and competency model. In this case, the system is provided with various types of data (job descriptions, work reports, standard operating procedures, patents, project records, the more the merrier) and a set of algorithms extract the skills and organize them into roles. This generally only gets one part of the way to a full model, but it can accelerate the process and protect against expert bias.A good competency model should connect to actual performance and be used to suggest learning and professional development opportunities.

Learning

No organization and certainly no individual is likely to have all the skills at the level of expertise needed. High performance organizations support learning and development. There are many ways to do this of course, and experiential learning is often one of the most important.Some of the things we have seen used as learning resources include:

• Mentors

• Role shadowing

• Communities of practice

• Social sites

• Learning projects

• Conferences

• Reading various resources

• Designing or writing various resources

• Taking a course (face-to-face, blended, online)

• Supporting a course

• Creating a course

Actual work is where most learning takes place, so performance records, project records and other such information are an important part of learning records. These are the sort of thing that one can capture into a learning record store (LRS) using xAPI. These records can also feed back into the skill and competency model!

Performance Support

Modern work can be complex and it is important to give people every chance of success. Most roles will benefit from various job aides and performance support tools. These can take many forms. Some are as simple as a template in a spreadsheet or presentation application (like Keystone or Powerpoint). Others are more sophisticated. Ibbaka, has created a set of online calculators that answer common questions that come up in pricing work.These days data and data analysis tools are also an important part of performance support. Companies are investing more and more into gathering, organizing and analyzing data and providing this to their people to improve decision making and outcome tracking.

Measurement

The performance improvement cycle becomes a cycle when the impact of competencies, learning and performance support are measured and the learning is fed back in. The most important thing to measure is performance itself. This is not easy. It can be difficult to tease out all of the different things that contribute to performance and performance is often impacted by external factors. Fortunately, the tools we have to understand all of these different causal factors are improving rapidly, largely through the work of Judea Pearl and his colleagues. Over the past two decades, they have developed a way to build causal models and then apply data to understand what is really happening behind the scenes. These models are already used in areas like epidemiology and evidence-based medicine and you can follow current developments on his website.

Measurement and analysis is an important part of any performance improvement program and should be applied to the initial competency model, the learning that supports it, the tools that people use in their work (and how they do the work). The goal is to use this measurement of outcomes to tease out the causal contributions and to initiate a cycle of continuous improvement.At TeamFit, we think of this as an application for John Boyd's classic OODA loop (Observe Orient Decide Act).Observe refers to the initial work of gathering skill and performance data. The competency model is a powerful way to provide orientation. Decisions are made and actions taken in the context of doing the work (performing a role, participating in a project, executing a process). High performance requires rapid cycles through the OODA loop.

Performance

All of this work is in aid of performance. Competency models, learning, performance support, even measurement, are relevant because they contribute to superior performance. Performance is about achieving goals, so a critical part of performance improvement is goal setting. Goal setting itself is a special form of expertise (one that can be represented in the competency model). In some cases, the goals themselves are unclear, and what is really needed is goal seeking. Goal seeking teams need different skills and motivation then teams that are mostly concerned with simply achieving goals.

At Ibbaka, our larger goal is to help you build effective performance improvement. The starting place is to understand what you mean by performance and then to build a competency model that describes the skills, levels of expertise, behaviours and roles that you need to deliver performance. The competency model provides the critical Orient step in Observe - Orient - Decide - Act. Learning is there to help your people develop the skills needed to deliver performance.

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