Developing competencies to drive growth
As Dematic’s business grows, it needs to ensure that new employees can quickly gain the competencies they need in order to contribute high-quality work.
Aligning skills with competencies can help your organisation round out its training strategies and drive business outcomes.
Although many people use the terms competency and skill interchangeably, these two words mean very different things, especially in the corporate learning space. When you’re training, evaluating or hiring an employee, you shouldn’t look only at their skills. They also need the right knowledge, attitudes and behaviours—the required competencies—to be successful in their job.
At the end of the day, you can’t have one without the other. Skills are about equipping people with tools. Competencies are about making sure they know when, where and how to use them. Together, they help people, departments and organisations achieve business goals.
Let’s dive deeper into the differences between competencies and skills and why they matter.
A competency is the set of skills, knowledge, behaviours and attitudes required to do work well, which include the following:
Competencies can be divided into three broad categories:
Ultimately, having the right competencies in place helps people do their jobs, complete projects and achieve goals.
A skill is a learned ability to complete a task according to a set of standards that are often tied to quality, outcomes and time. In essence, it describes what someone can do proficiently.
Skills typically fall into one of two buckets:
Because skills tend to be more focused and granular, their initial professional development pathways can also be more streamlined. If you have someone on your team who wants to improve their communication, they can take a course geared toward that. But to ensure the ability sticks over time, they need motivation and reason to use it, and they need opportunities to practice, perfect and use it. What bigger goal does the individual skill contribute to for the person and the organisation?
By seeing how competencies and skills interrelate, you can better understand the differences between them. Consider these three examples:
We’ve established what competencies are, but why should organisations care? What difference do they make? Put simply, competencies matter because they’re what drive business outcomes.
Building on competencies can make training more scalable because they provide clear, repeatable pathways for development. They can help organisations identify the right people and teams for the right jobs more easily and quickly. Competencies can also be motivating for learners, as they’re often tied to tangible outcomes and goals for growth.
Does your organisation still need to put considerable effort into helping its people develop the right skills? Absolutely. But you need to know why they’re developing them. What gaps are they filling? Which goals are they tied to? How are you tracking progress and giving people opportunities to use their skills, knowledge and behaviours?
Aligning skills with competencies can help your organisation answer those questions and round out its training and business strategies.
As Dematic’s business grows, it needs to ensure that new employees can quickly gain the competencies they need in order to contribute high-quality work.
If you focus solely on a person’s skills, you risk overlooking other important attributes required for a job. They may look good on paper, but they may not yet have the right knowledge, attitude or work habits to meet expectations.
Competencies are made up of skills—plus knowledge, behaviours and attitudes.
Skills are crucial parts of competencies, but competency is not a skill in itself.
Key competencies and skills vary depending on the job, career stage and industry. A job or task analysis can help you determine which competencies and skills are required for a particular position.
You should focus on cultivating skills to develop competencies and equip your employees with the knowledge, behaviors and attitudes required to effectively apply new skills and improve workplace performance.
Both. In some instances, people may need discrete skills to take on or advance in a role. In other cases, they’ll need broader sets of competencies (skills, knowledge, attitudes and behaviours) to be successful.
For each position, your organisation should encourage managers and L&D teams to work together to identify the competencies most critical for success. Then you can more easily identify skills gaps and pinpoint where employees need to focus their training and professional development.
Once you know what competencies are required for existing and future positions, you can more easily isolate skills gaps. Now you know where to begin reskilling or upskilling to prepare people for those positions, and you can confirm the need for a larger investment in your company’s L&D program.
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