Competency Modelling for Future Success

Competency Modelling for Future Success

What are ‘Competencies’?

Competencies encompass the knowledge, skills, and attributes required for successful performance. In addition to intelligence and aptitude, the underlying characteristics of a person, such as traits, habits, motives, social roles, and self-image, as well as the environment around them, enable a person to deliver superior performance in a given job, role, or situation.

How do you define them and establish if someone has the required competencies?

Most employers will have completed a job description for the various roles in their organization. When they want to take on a new employee in that role they will make a list of the core competencies that are needed.

Defining the competencies of ‘Elite Performers’

Traditionally we fall back on the things we can measure more easily such as the qualifications and previous job history and either ignore or use our gut instinct for the items that we are unable to measure, such as characteristics, traits, habits, motives and self image. Despite applying this criteria for hiring or promoting we usually find there is a huge differential in performance across our team.

Competency Modeling is the activity of determining the specific competencies that are characteristic of high performance and success in a given job. Competency Modeling can be applied to a variety of human resource activities. Successful organizations identify their core competencies and are applying this competency data to improve performance and provide them with a competitive edge.

What are the options for Competency Modelling?

In 2000, Schoonover and Arthur Andersen conducted a study to determine how organizations use competency data and to understand what practices lead to success. The summary from this research was distilled in to one guiding principal:

“Competency applications, like all significant change initiatives, will be successful when best practices related to development and implementation are consistently and relentlessly followed.”

PML have partnered with AxiaMetrics, to bring unique and market leading technology that can be applied to provide an accurate Competency Modeling process for your organization.

Warnings associated with the Axia Competency Model:

Significant Change Initiative -

Using the Axia Competency Model will bring dramatic improvements to your hiring process. Its use will ensure you only employ people with the key competencies required to be successful in your organization, this is likely to significantly reduce the time taken to recruit the right candidate and reduce your candidate short list.

After hiring only candidates with the right competencies you will notice dramatically improved overall performance, significant reductions in staff turnover and in the time it takes a new hire to be productive.

Best Practice

If you are reviewing the market looking for the right Competency Model, you will be offered many ways to identify and establish the competencies of your elite performers, and these may well include:

• 360 Degree Appraisal

• Subjective Questioning

• Psychometric Testing

• Behavioral Analysis

If offered any of the above, you are not being offered Best Practice as all of these are methods of analysis that have fundamental flaws. Most will take up large amounts of management and consultancy time resulting in significant cost and none will identify the true competencies that are making the difference in your team. Only the Axia profile, underpinned by many years experience of creating bespoke Competency Models for leading businesses and organizations, can provide a truly accurate competency benchmark.

Consistent and Relentless Development and Implementation

Through years of Competency Modeling and trialling the profile against its major competitors, we are able to guarantee that we will provide you with the most accurate and cost effective Competency Model available today.

Unless the information the Axia profile provides is rigorously applied to your hiring and development programmes it will bring no benefit. It must be combined with a corporate strategy to want to be the best and internal and external processes to only ire those who have the potential to be the best.