Strategically Close Competency Gaps With Targeted Upskilling
Competency modeling offers learning and development (L&D) professionals a data-driven approach to understanding employee skills and abilities, and their alignment with job roles and functions.
However, building impactful competency models can be complex, particularly in large, geographically dispersed organizations. This episode of Training Industry’s podcast for L&D professionals offers expert advice that can help you begin building custom competency models for your organization. Listen now for insights from Dr. Amy DuVernet, CPTM, director of training and development at Training Industry, Alyssa Kaszycki, learning product manager at Training Industry, Brian Blecke, founding partner and senior learning strategist at Actio Learning, and Kelly Smith, partner and senior performance consultant at Actio Learning.
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Additional Resources:
- Course: Competency Modeling Certificate
- Wiki: The Training Manager Competency Model™
- Wiki: Competency Model
- Article: Linking Competency Models to Modern Learning Strategies
The transcript for this episode follows:
Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Business of Learning, the learning leader’s podcast from training industry.
Sarah Gallo:
Hi, welcome back to The Business of Learning. I’m Sarah Gallo, senior editor at Training Industry, here with my co-host, Michelle Egleston Schwartz, editor in chief.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Welcome. Before we begin, here’s a brief message from our sponsor, Training Industry Courses’ newly released Competency Modeling Certificate course.
Ad:
Competency modeling is a crucial component for delivering targeted training that bridges skills gaps, allowing you to upskill your workforce with precision. Do you have the tools needed to strategically close competency gaps in your organization? In Training Industry Courses’ Competency Modeling Certificate program, you’ll learn a step-by-step process for crafting custom competency models tailored to your organization’s unique needs. Develop the skills needed to create, refine and maintain competency models and make a lasting impact on your organization’s success. This two-day course will take you through a deep dive in competency modeling the key to optimizing your L&D strategies, bridging skills gaps through targeted upskilling, establishing data-driven talent management processes, and creating personalized individual and team development plans. To learn more about this course, click the link in the shownotes for this episode.
Sarah Gallo: Competency modeling has emerged as a powerful tool for L&D professionals. It provides a data-driven framework to inform key talent management processes from upskilling to career pathing and more. Ultimately, competency models align skills and abilities to specific roles or functions within the business, positioning both the organization and its people for success. But creating effective competency models is easier said than done, which is why today we’re speaking with some experts who can help with us. We have Dr. Amy DuVernet, a Certified Professional in Training Management and Training Industry’s director of training and development, Alyssa Kaszycki, learning product manager at Training Industry, Brian Blecke, founding partner and senior learning strategist at Actio Learning, and Kelly Smith, partner and senior performance consultant at Actio Learning. So Amy, Alyssa, Brian and Kelly, welcome to the podcast.
Brian Blecke:
Thank you.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Yes, welcome. I’m excited for this conversation today. And to kind of start us off, I’d love for us to define some key terms here because we often hear the words, skills, competencies, and capabilities used interchangeably in the L&D space. Can you walk us through kind of the differences between these commonly used words?
Brian Blecke:
Yeah, I think you’re right. They are often interchangeably used. That’s the reality of I think part of the training. The whole training industry kind of suffers from this from time to time. So all of them represent, in our view, an underlying characteristic of a person which results in some sort of effective performance or behavior. They define something underlying, and I think it was McClellan that sort of started this whole idea way back when in ‘73 when he trying to figure out a way to test for something different than intelligence tests, a way to determine whether someone could be a proficient or effective employee or a human being out in the world based on some of the things that we’ve learned and we’ve researched and we’ve kind of dealt with as we’ve been working there. There’s a difference between the way we on the HR training and development side look at it and the way the business stakeholders tend to look at it. Business stakeholders tend to look at things like job performance as a set of characteristics and what we see employees doing. These three ideas, skills, competencies and capabilities are sort of a form of abstraction from that. So skills are usually, as we’ve encountered them, something specific, measurable, generally more task oriented in their frame competencies sort of sit above that, which might combine numerous skills with some form of knowledge or some kind of abilities. And then capabilities often sit on top of that, which is the ability to apply competence and skills and the ability to perform some sort of function. So when we tend to think about that as we go out in the world and we work with this stuff, we tend to think about how do we bring all of that back to job performance and job competence. So the nature is bringing, as you’ve kind of said, competencies back to the actual performance and work that people do. So that’s kind of how I think at least I view it. Kelly, do you have something similar or different or….
Kelly Smith:
No, I think you and I are definitely in alignment on this, but I think it’s making sure that everyone else is kind of in agreement. What do you guys think?
Alyssa Kaszycki:
Yeah, I would agree with that in that it’s just about making sure that you and your stakeholders and everyone involved in the project all agree is what you’re talking about. And I think a lot of times it really doesn’t matter what the difference between these terms are. That’s kind of like my controversial opinion. I don’t think it really matters. I think it matters what you’re trying to accomplish. So what I’m looking at, if my goal is to upskill for a technology company, I’m going to be probably looking at a different set of things than if I’m worried about career pathing in a leadership development program or something like that. So it’s really just about what are you trying to accomplish and then whatever words you want to use to all be in alignment.
Amy DuVernet:
That’s a great point. I totally agree with that, and it definitely plays into a really important first step in any competency modeling initiative is really understanding what you’re trying to accomplish.
Sarah Gallo:
Now that we’ve made the distinction between skills, competencies and capabilities, can you each share your definitions for competency modeling as a process?
Brian Blecke:
That’s a genius question because we’ve looked from time to time, and Alyssa, you may remember some from previous conversations. We’ve talked a little bit about the idea of what is this thing that we’re dealing with. So we went out and looked, and there’s a couple of research papers, one from 2014 and one from 2016, they’re meta-analysis. They came up with 30 valid different definitions of what a competency model framework is. They all informed some kind of research, and it goes directly, I think to what Alyssa was saying, which is we just have to define our terms. And a smart way to do that is define our terms based on what the utility of this thing is going to be, how it’s going to get used inside the organization, what kinds of decisions are going to be made based on it, how is it going to tie things together? In some cases, if we’re going to use it for hiring processes, that’s going to give it a particular flavor. If we’re going to use it for career laddering, it’s going to give it a different flavor if we’re going to use it for performance management, going to have another flavor even still. So I think the crucial thing, because there’s so many differences in the way that we could define it, is that anytime we get started with competency modeling, we actually spend the time to define it and make sure that every step that we go forward with it, we’re making sure that every new participant in the process understands what the utility is of that definition and what that definition is. And that’s not easy as we’re going to get to probably at some point in today’s conversation. That is if a competency model is built with a small group of people who are inside baseball so to speak, and they know all the ins and outs of why certain words were chosen and why certain words were not used, as it rolls out into the organization, others will have the same questions that they had. And so it requires a level of communication and change management to push those things out into the organization so that we accidentally don’t dilute the value of it and that we get the utility from it that’s projected at the beginning of going through an effort like that.
Amy DuVernet:
Absolutely. I agree with you, Brian. It very much depends on the purpose and understanding. When I think about competency modeling, I think fundamentally we’re talking about a job analysis, right? So competency modeling grew out of the traditional job analytic or work analytic processes which take a job and boil it down to hundreds of tasks, responsibilities, job duties, mapping those onto the KSAOs, the knowledge, skills, abilities [or] other characteristics that employees need to perform those tasks. And in the 1990s, competency modeling emerged as a way to simplify that process. The basic problem with job analysis processes is that it produces vast amounts of information and data, and it’s like how do I take all of that and actually use it to design training to hire the right employees to develop performance management systems? So competency modeling takes that approach, that job analytic approach, but simplifies the way that we describe jobs and what’s needed to perform them.
Kelly Smith:
That is true, but the risk with that approach is it becomes so boiled down or so overly simplified that lose sight of that connectivity to the work. So if there’s five or six or 10 broad competencies, having the conversation with the employee or with business leaders to really get them to understand and really buy into how this competency impacts relates to the work that we do, that disconnect that happens when you boil things down to such a simplistic model or framework loses a lot in the translation. So the process or the method that you use to get there are really important to get, as Brian, I think said, drag people along the way so you’re not building it with a small group of folks that everybody understands exactly what this one word means and it has hours of conversation tied behind that one word, but no one else really gets it and it can be interpreted so many different ways. So I think that’s one of the things that we found that is one of the challenges of going the competency model way versus a more traditional job analysis, which can be a little bit more voluminous and unwieldy is a little bit easier to make those connections back to the work.
Amy DuVernet:
That’s a great point, Kelly. Gosh, I remember when I was going through grad school, this was very controversial that competency models were seen as not rigorous or not scientific, that job analysis were the gold standard. And I agree, I think that both need that rigor and need to be tied to those specifics of the job. And so I really liked seeing how competency modeling has evolved to include that rigor and to the get down to the specifics, but it does create this framework that’s very easy to communicate what you’ve found. Yeah,
Brian Blecke:
The interesting question too, because I think in some respects what we’re all talking about is how close the camera lens is put to the work. From a training perspective, when we sit and we think about what L&D has to do for its organization, it often has a mandate to serve every human being in the organization, which is different than what a line business leader has who’s just focused on making sure that the performance of this role is what it needs to be or it improves to achieve a set of outcomes the organization wants. So necessarily we have to sit the camera at different distances in order to get both needs met. And one of the things we’ve seen is that some companies have put that camera lens so far back that they say that these five things, six things, seven things are universally applicable to every role. And as you move forward closer to the roles themselves and you look at the work, begin to realize that that’s an artificial structure that creates this sort of mental gymnastics that we have to go through to say, if one of our competencies is customer-centric behavior, but this role, that role and the other one don’t actually work with any customers, we have to come up with a way to say, well, you still work with customers, but it’s two or three steps away, or you’re working with internal people that are customers or create these new definitions. But that’s in part because the camera lens positioned so far back from the work that we’ve tried to accomplish something that’s good for everyone and potentially we’ve done something that’s good for no one. The question about where you put the camera as you think about that.
Amy DuVernet:
Exactly, and I think that really depends on what the purpose is right back. So what you touched on there, Brian, I think really important competency models often include an element of culture. So what you just said, customer orientation, perhaps that’s really just encompassing one of our values as a company when we call it competency across all jobs. So I think it really depends on how we want this framework to be used. Are we using it to reinforce culture? Maybe that’s fine for there to be a set of five competencies across the organization, whereas if we’re using it to develop our employees so that they are prepared for a specific job task, it needs to be that camera lens needs to be a lot closer in on what they do in the job.
Kelly Smith:
That is true. And we found that organizations all often have multiple models in place, the core competencies or the company-wide competencies that you’re right, that usually are aligned with their vision and mission and values in trying to achieve culture, but they need to sometimes coexist with these employee development focused ones that are more role specific. But then there might be also a set of leadership competencies that if you’re in that function in that company, but in a leadership role, there’s a different set of competencies. And when you’re approaching competency modeling, I think it’s important to understand what’s going on in the organization and are we going to just be adding to the confusion if we create yet a different framework with a different model? And as an individual employee, I have to then navigate, well, what do I do with these core competencies, these functional competencies that you’re giving me? And oh, by the way, I’m now moving into a leadership position so I have to rationalize these competencies. It can be very overwhelming to an employee to have to figure out. So I think it’s very important from an upfront design standpoint to understand not only what am I trying to accomplish with this effort that we’re doing with this model, but how does it fit into the larger picture of the organization and how am I going to design and communicate in a way that dovetails them, aligns them, helps the end user figure out how they navigate through all this stuff. It can be very overwhelming if we design what would be a very good model competency model in our lane, but we don’t look across the others and help figure out how they all are going to work together. Because the very people we’re trying to benefit end up getting kind of toasted in that process because the brand new Brian to the company is looking around trying to figure out how do I get from day one to day 50 or day 60 and I’ve got three different models to cope with and I don’t understand the steps. How do I get from A to B?
Alyssa Kaszycki:
So I wanted to bring us back to the original question, which is how we define the competency modeling process. And so I think there’s two parts to this that are important, which is one we’re establishing what are the necessary characteristics, whatever word we want to use to be successful in a given role. And then I think a part that’s really important is that we’re formalizing that. And so I think that is what makes competency modeling threatening sometimes to people is that we’re defining what someone in that role should look like, what their characteristic profile should look like, and then we’re formalizing what that idea is and establishing that into our processes. And so I think when we start talking about the level of specificity, it can be daunting or perhaps sticky to get really specific on what somebody should look like when there are different ways to be successful in a role. So it’s that balance of we can be way too specific or we can be so abstracted to the point of being useless.
Brian Blecke:
Well, it’s interesting Alyssa, because I think in some respects that might be a challenge that we experience on the training or talent side, but we don’t experience on the business side. Most everybody can pretty much understand how they’re being evaluated when they look through the lens of job performance and managers or coaches looking at them and saying, Brian, you do better here or there. So I think there is a level of this that is really obvious that the business side seems to get, and we on the training side or the talent side, sometimes don’t seem to get so easily. I think we’re trying to solve a different problem than they are. They want to give direct feedback and make sure people can perform quickly. Competency model is an abstraction in the middle of that conversation that doesn’t benefit them. But for us on the training side, gives us a vehicle to communicate to a lot more people with our scarce and limited resources than we otherwise would have to do if we were just dealing with the same thing that the line of business leaders are dealing with. So I don’t know that it’s a uniformly consistent thing that discomfort exists. I think it might exist on our side, but not necessarily on the business side.
Sarah Gallo:
That’s a good point. So much to consider here. It’s definitely a nuanced term and process for sure, which is why we wanted to talk to you all about it.
Brian Blecke:
Well, and if I can add one concept, one of the challenges is if you have multiple teams maybe or individuals or departments inside an organization, particularly a large organization trying to create models that reflect their specific thing, consistency across those models is very difficult to achieve and often creates. And we are dealing with this one of our clients right now who is essentially trying to create instruction for a stack of selling roles, many of which have competency models built for them, but when you push them all together, they don’t look the same, but it’s the same role in the organization, but they came from different lines of business and different people built the models. And so now there’s this reconciliation of the reconciliation that starts to happen, that consistency of, and I think we’re going to get to this at some point today, how you go through and build them, what are the rules for building them? What are the choices you make? What’s in what’s out? And making that consistent is critical. We have the ability by doing something like this, it’s a strategic product as a competency model, but we have the ability to really create chaos if we don’t do it well and we don’t deploy it well in the organization because the people it affects are the frontline employees trying to live their lives and do their jobs well. If we create something that kind of gets in their way, not so useful.
Kelly Smith:
I want to circle back to the definition of competency model again too, because thinking this conversation made me think of a couple of early conversations with different clients along the way about just getting agreement about what the competency model is. One of them wanted a framework, a pretty one page picture that had the competencies that related to the function that we were supporting, but then we realized it had to align with the core competency. So then it had a pretty little circular thing that overlaid that and it was the one page view, and then of course you need to name it and describe the competency. So that’s one level down. And then so it’s the framework, the competencies themselves a nice succinct description of that competency, but then we have those behavioral descriptions, the things that say what makes me be an entry level or fully proficient or master in it, and that’s a scale that can be very different depending on how you’re looking at it. And then they said, “Well, how are people going to know where they should be?” So we need to establish a baseline or a watermark that if I’m in this role at this level, I need to be here on this progression. How are we going to assess it? So even just having that conversation to get agreement on what is the competency model? Is it the framework? Is it the defined competencies? Is it the behavioral indicators? And to what level are those customized to what level, function, role, that sort of thing. So even at the level of coming in to engage in a project with a client, there’s definitions that need to be established just about what a competency model is.
Sarah Gallo:
Yeah, that’s great. Well, before we move into the how here, there’s one other term I want to clear up any confusion for our listeners about which is that of skills mapping. And we hear that pop up a lot in these kinds of conversations. So can you kind of walk us through how competency modeling differs from skills mapping as a process?
Brian Blecke:
Let’s start with an assumption if we’re in the same organization that they don’t already use those as synonyms, that there is some distinction that they have between them. So sort of got to this in the beginning a little bit. Skills are often skills mapping, which is a sort of set of activities that go around. The definition of a skill is usually more discreet in its nature, tends to focus on tasks and may map specifically to a job requirement. So that might be more like linking performance tasks to a particular performance outcome, which you might be able to assess employees on a competency model. Then again, kind of sits above that, which is often more comprehensive, might be more organizational in its nature and might be up a level more at a role or a role family level. And it’s really sort of a broader framework that can be used for assessing career laddering and developing talent across a set of essentially levels. The approach to creating them is different and ultimately I think just by even that definition that I just offered, the utility is different. So that’s probably more than just that way to look at it, but that’s kind of how we’ve encountered it in the marketplace.
Amy DuVernet:
I would concur, Brian. I think on the one hand these terms are often used interchangeably, but where there is kind of distinction, it is in that level of specificity or that focus, that skills mapping is going to be more specific to a job role or a specific job role and get into a narrower focus in terms of being able to create more micro levels of differentiation of the skills needed in that role. Whereas competency modeling is going to be more broader strokes and could often include more aspects of culture within the organization and apply across different work groups. The other thing that I think, Kelly, you brought up something earlier that I haven’t really thought about, but certainly actually I think does distinguish between the two. I don’t think you get that visual summary often with the skills mapping, whereas competency modeling, I think the visual summary is a pretty key aspect of communicating what the model is. So having that sort of designed element of how the competencies fit together,
Kelly Smith:
I haven’t thought about that, but that is kind of true. I do envision or see skills mapping more like an a la carte menu sort of I pick and choose based on where I am, what the skills are that I need or want to develop, which is a little bit different than the competency model approach, too.
Brian Blecke:
Well, I think we can’t escape the reality that the training marketplace is really diverse and continues to splinter. And so I think in some ways some of these labels actually are brought to us by people with clever marketing techniques and offering some of them as having a distinction without a difference sometimes in that a lot of it, I have a skills ontology that’s built in a platform that does these X, Y, Z cool things might be totally valid, but it does introduce noise and in the marketplace that well, how does this skills ontology map to the skills thing map to that competency framework map to this other thing? And so again, the definition of terms is not only about how do I look inward to the organization to make some of these decisions, it’s how do I look into the marketplace to evaluate what’s available and understand whether the thing that’s available and I’m considering matches that definition or pushes my definition around or there’s such a deficit between what we are thinking and what they offer. We don’t pursue that conversation. So I don’t think we can escape the clever minds of marketing geniuses all around the world coming up with different ways to tell us a new thing about the same old thing.
Amy DuVernet:
The excellent point, Brian, it’s the flavor of the month are in, I remember I think capabilities tried to replace competencies a few years ago, and yet to Alyssa’s point, what’s really most important is the purpose. What are we going to do with this and making sure that we are all aligned on what we’re talking about.
Brian Blecke:
And durability is a real question mark in any of these things. I think there’s a certain sense in the L&D space, maybe it’s more in the talent space. Done with that now, I can move on, right? So I’ve created it, I have my beautiful one little picture and somebody comes down the line later and says, but I have this other thing. And then becomes the shoehorning process. Your new thing, your new idea actually fits inside this other thing. If we elbow this other idea over a little bit and we just wedge it in here, it fits right in because I don’t want to revisit the whole thing. I want to just play with the new thing you’re bringing into the conversation. So there’s this kind of permanence that sort of implied but isn’t really real when we start talking about organizational competencies like this that when we get down to it, work requirements, knowledge and skill requirements of that work are changing fast, really fast and AI is helping us move them even faster. So some of these kind of things that feel like they’re going to be permanent really aren’t. So if you’re going to go down this route, make sure you institute a mechanism to revisit these things on a cadence that keeps it fresh and keeps it attached to the business in a way that’s still useful.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Definitely. That’s such a good point. I’d love to shift gears now and focus on the how do we build these competency models because creating them can seem incredibly daunting, especially for new training managers or those on a team of one. Can you walk our listeners through the competency modeling process, step-by-step?
Brian Blecke:
How much time you got? So we’ve already given away the shop on the first big step. We’ve all talked about it and it’s all been something we’ve declared before, really getting forward. Step one is figure out what its utility is. Why are we doing this? What is the business purpose of this thing? What’s our end game? What decisions are we going to make and how will this thing inform those decisions? That’s step one, no matter which way you go from where we’re going to go next, that’s step one. So there’s two broadly thought about. I think Kelly and I would maybe agree on this, maybe not. We’ll find out in a minute. There’s probably two different ways to do it. One is ground up and one is top down. So ground up is usually a place where we’re thinking about job performance first and we’re architecting, we’re laddering up from that, abstracting from that base. And so Amy, when we were talking a minute ago about the idea of where does that camera lens sit, that becomes an essential part of that conversation because how far back do we go and still create value? So we’ll talk in a minute about techniques in that, but the second big way is to start from the top and go down. So maybe you start with an existing framework and now you have to sort of shoehorn it into the way the organization behaves those distinct set of steps, but they have a lot of things in common. It’s just a matter of where you tend to start. I think we tend to focus on the first one. We tend to start at that level and work our way up. So we tend to look at what is job performance, what are the knowledge, skills and competence requirements of that performance? And that is one of the things that’s a challenge about competency models is they don’t scale down very well. So if we’re talking about somebody identifying a discreet issue, a discreet deficiency building a competency model, the big thing is usually not going to be much bang for the buck here. So we’re talking usually about a role level or an organizational level thing. When we start with a competency, when we start talking about this. So when we’re thinking about performance, we’re thinking about role level performance, not a discrete deficiency. There may be discrete deficiencies and emerge through that process, but we’re not starting there. We’re not starting by somebody raising their hand and say, we don’t close enough deals, fix that. So then once we’ve got that sort of base layer, and what we generally think about when we’re documenting that kind of stuff is what are the work outputs? What are the key tasks to producing those outputs? What are the measures of those outputs, quality measures, velocity measures, quantity measures, things like that. And then what are the knowledge skills and competencies that enable us to be able to do that? And we tend to look at that through the mastery construct. So we’re thinking about exemplar performers, top performers, master performers as being sort of a target. And then when we think about downline, when we think about leveling out those competencies, we’re usually then starting from the sort of top of the pile and working our way back to the beginning of the pile. So we’re thinking about staging those behavioral indicators from the top performance back. Once we’ve got that, then it’s an abstraction conversation to look for commonality across roles or within roles to figure out where are we hitting the right cluster of knowledge, skills and competencies to actually declare that that thing is a competency and we can define it in some discrete way. So it looks like it lives on its own. This is the beginning of one of the hardest parts of this kind of a process, which is the negotiation process. It’s the discussions between, and this is usually who gets in the sandbox, somebody from talent, somebody from training somebody from the business or many somebody from those different constituents and somebody owns the negotiation of all of that and has to help the team figure it out. Now sometimes we’ve seen that single step take months for a role because people get entrenched in why this word versus that word. So it can take a while once you get through, and by the way, I’m sort of ignoring important things like that. Job analysis requires a validation step, so you have to go through and do internal reviews and make sure that’s proper and appropriate. Then you go to the competency modeling, you’re going to go through a review process and get approval. Once you get to there, then it becomes a conversation around how do you begin to map that against other things like career ladders and stuff like that. So without going too discreet, those are some of the big block steps that we’ve seen. Kelly, I think you probably have additional thoughts about that, but I don’t know.
Kelly Smith:
Yeah, I do. Thanks. So the process that you talked about, going through those different steps, engaging those other audiences, training folks, talent folks, business folks, HR folks, they’re all stakeholders here. And sometimes I think you may try to shortcut the engagement because it is difficult. It is hard to get these people together. It is hard to negotiate to an agreement. It’s hard to do that. But the process of doing that gets you people that are bought in engaged, understand the model. When you shortcut that process and many do either trying to do it in a vacuum and then launch it and roll it out, or even starting with a pre-fab model using a defined competency library or competency model and just trying to use it. You don’t have that connectivity to the business. The words aren’t the words that resonate with your business, the connectivity to the role and the job might be a little bit disjointed and you miss the big thing about getting the buy-in and the engagement along the way. So part of the pain and suffering that you go through by doing it the hard way is what makes it more successful in the end, either through the quality of the product or the viability and adaptability for it. You get people who understand it can embrace it and can use it versus here’s this thing, I don’t quite see how it fits in my world, but it was easier to create, so we just did it. I think that’s a challenge that is difficult, but it does impact the process that you go through to create it. Trying to avoid that make it easier does make it easier and quicker, but it does have these other implications that you want to keep in mind because it will hurt you in the end, I guess.
Alyssa Kaszycki:
There’s just two things I would want to add to this. One is a very daunting process and I think that’s what stops a lot of people from even trying. So my biggest piece of advice would just be to get started and then take it from there. Take it one step at a time. Don’t think about it as this whole daunting thing that you can’t possibly do. My second thing to get into the weeds a little bit is that artificial intelligence is a huge help in this process. So when it comes to just getting your initial draft together, creating definitions, customizing your definitions, artificial intelligence can be a huge help in cutting some of the work time on those processes. And then it’s such an iterative process anyway that that’s all going to eventually go through your SMEs and get perfected. But just giving you some place to start artificial intelligence is going to be a huge help.
Brian Blecke:
So if I were to go back a little bit to Michelle’s question at the very beginning of this, some of the techniques that you might think about employing in order to get that sort of baseline job, again working the performance up, you can do a variety of different techniques. Some of them are more time intensive and some of them are less. You can survey the population in a particular role. You’d have to build a model first of what you project the work to be in order to be able to get some validation from that approach. You might also go in and interview individuals in those roles. Having a framework in place before you walk in that would guide the way you do the interview is super helpful. And maybe even how you document the results of the interview. You can do interviews in group settings, you can do ’em as focus groups. There are a lot of different, and sometimes you want to do more than one. You can observe and ask as you’re doing the observations, all of those techniques are potentially viable given the right situation. And sometimes you use more than one of them to get to the end game. There might even be just a straight up data analysis. If we’re in a particular job that is measured to death, call centers come to mind. You might have the opportunity to really build right out of the data what you project to be the base case. And then Alyssa, to your point, the conversation then is can we utilize some resources that would help us build something fast that we can test drive? So there are plenty of sort of mechanical techniques that you can be done at that beginning stage as you’re going from the bottom up and then after the mechanical piece, everything else is essentially negotiation, communication and the kind of work that has to be done to get agreed about the things.
Sarah Gallo:
I want to circle back, Brian, you mentioned the first step here being determining that purpose and that higher level business need. So I’m interested to hear how can we connect competency models and that framework back to the training strategy, which if it’s done right should be aligned to those business needs. What does that process look like?
Brian Blecke:
So it depends a little bit about how you’ve architected the competency model. If you’ve done a reasonably good job at establishing the behavioral indicators and the levels, you almost have a sort of built in backbone to a training plan or a learning strategy that would suggest at the beginning stages might look more like entry level and the higher stages might look like actualized in the role, right? Where you can make decisions about your own career planning. You’re picking things that are interesting to you where at the beginning you’re being instructed how to be proficient. So the backbone might automatically be there. Now that is a testable premise because the idea that the competency model was built for a set of business outcomes still has to be validated that that does match. Pointing it in the right direction is a huge step in the right direction, but making sure that it actually does what it’s directed to do is the big next step. So part of the question is how does it roll out into the organization? Well, if we can attach a training strategy to it or a learning strategy to it, we can often begin to connect those behavioral markers to the actual job performance and we can start to see it at that lower level. How do you do that? Well, you’ve got to work really hard to figure out what the performance is behind the scenes at those different levels. So it’s one thing to say generically having a customer focus means X, but if I’m in this role, what does that actually look like when I talk about training it and then measuring it as a performance? So knowledge acquisition. What’s interesting about this is I think competency frameworks in a commercial setting might be a unique bird when compared to things like in an educational setting. Because in a business setting we have a thing that we can look at which is application to job performance. We can look at did that competency match up or did that what we taught them to do, did that match up with the actual job performance? And that’s a place we can measure to figure out if the goals that we aligned ourselves to are actually being realized.
Kelly Smith:
And Brian, I think there’s another angle on this too, is oftentimes competency models are introduced, they’re rolled out, and there’s some sort of assessment step. I am in this role, I assess myself against these or a 360 -iew and we get data from a role, a job family, a function about where these people are and compare it to where they’re expected to be and identify gaps. This can help inform your L&D function about where their gaps in the organization that you may want to focus training solutions at. So it can help drive your learning strategy that way as well. Brian’s kind of focusing on the job performance, but also if you’re implementing this and there is data coming from assessments and things, which often the clients do that, that is a way of informing or prioritizing because I think Brian, where you’re leading is you would have the, here’s the entry level, the intermediate and advanced level, and here’s how we could align training to that. So if I want to get from A to B, here’s my learning opportunities. Well, if you don’t have all of those there and you need as a training organization to build those, you might need to prioritize. And that’s a way of coming at the alignment of business needs by using the data from your competency model and the assessments.
Brian Blecke:
And I think a big part of that too is if there is a deficiency in the training offered that matches up to a level in the a competency framework question really comes down to is does the organization have an imperative to build training for all of those or does the organization say, that one’s not worth it, we’re not going to spend money on that training. The performance doesn’t rise to the level that we should invest that way. It doesn’t mean you don’t still have to reach that level of competence, it just means you’re going to do it through informal learning experiences and you’re going to do it through on the job experiences in some way rather than having the training organization invest money in an asset that’s going to be used to help you get from step one to step two. So the other thing that was interesting, Kelly to say, when you started talking about that assessment, what’s interesting is that action can have the effect of cementing that model and creating an impression of more durability than is actually real. So the minute we start going in and tinkering with the model because we’re going to go in there and revisit it every six months or every three months or whatever, we start tinkering with it and we’ve got data attached to the previous version of the model and people have made decisions based on the data attached to that previous version of the model and now we want to use that new version of the model, but we don’t have the data connection anymore. That raises a whole bunch of different questions about things like how do you attach the training plan and the learning strategy to that? How do career ladders connect to that? This is a strategic conversation. Again, it doesn’t scale down very well if we’re trying to handle a discrete problem, but if it’s done well and proper attention is given to it and you look at it through the lens of this evergreen sort of conversation, you’ll make different choices than cementing it for. It’s the competency model that will last forever.
Sarah Gallo:
I think it would be helpful to hear kind of a real-world example here. So with that Amy, can you share a little bit about the creation of the Training Manager Competency Model and what went into that because we know it is the foundation for all of our courses.
Amy DuVernet:
Yeah, absolutely. I’d love to. So our training manager competency research grew out of this ongoing research study that began before I joined training industry. It started in 2008 looking at the best practices and key process capabilities of high performing training organizations. And one of the key findings that we got to really quickly is that training managers or the leader of the training organization tends to really be a linchpin in terms of being highly critical to determining how effective a training organization is. So based on that finding, we knew we needed to figure out what it was that a training manager needs in order to create that success. So we launched this competency research and it was truly a labor of love. We started with the kind of traditional job analysis, looking to identify the core responsibilities of a training manager. And I’ll say this competency effort is different than some of the other competency efforts that you might encounter in that we were trying to define what was needed across a profession, training managers in all companies in all contexts across the globe. So we wanted to, our lens was a little bit broader as Brian frames it then you might be if you were talking about a training manager in a specific organization. But we started by identifying seven core responsibilities that all training managers are really tasked with and then look to identify the competencies needed for those responsibilities. And we did that through a variety of different ways. So Brian, you mentioned some of ’em observation interviews, focus groups. We didn’t have AI available at the time, Alyssa, or at least I didn’t, don’t have it available. I couldn’t hop on ChatGPT, but I did look to tons of external resources. I mean, we don’t need to recreate the wheel. There’s lots of research out there that defines competencies of managers that defines competencies of training professionals. So look to those to help as a starting point or a baseline that we could then talk to training managers about and talk about in focus groups since we compiled an inventory of a massive number of competencies that seemed related to those core responsibilities in the job. And then we went out and did that survey that Brian was talking about. So we asked incumbents, the training managers, we asked their supervisors, we asked peers and employees and clients, the customer of the training manager to complete this inventory and really talk to us about what competencies were most important as well as most frequently needed to complete the job or be successful in the job. And then we narrowed those down through a variety of ways. We looked at agreement, which is really important, reader agreement across the different types of readers as well as just across everybody completing the survey, reliability of the information, how predictive it was, various outcomes. So did a lot to kind of validate and narrow down to our final competency model. I say final I guess maybe in air quotes because certainly we do revisit. In fact, we’re continuously collecting data on our competency model. I’ll say because we were looking at a profession, we were gathering data across all kinds of industries. We wanted to make sure that the folks that we talked to and the people that completed the survey were representative of the breadth of individuals within the training manager profession. So they’re really important that we understood the purpose of what we were doing for the model and use that to define our methodology and to validate our findings. And to your question earlier, Sarah, how do you tie it to the strategy? For us, we knew we were going to use this model to launch a set of certifications and courses for training managers that this would be our guidepost and our foundation for our courses and that we needed to identify all of those core competencies that would be necessary to perform that job. So I think we went a little bit broader in the competencies. 24 competencies is quite a lot, but we’re talking about training managers across various contexts. So it was important that we didn’t just describe what it was necessary for a training manager in 70% of roles, but that we really tried to cover the profession as a whole.
Brian Blecke:
I’m really interested that you said that because I was wondering about the difference. There’s probably plenty, the difference between doing that for profession versus doing that for a family of roles inside of an organization. You use the word right at the tail end there. There’s different contexts. And so it’s also, there’s an interesting conversation to be had going back inside of an organization rather than the profession. There is this sort of natural intention to try to put everything into the pile to expand. Well, there’s this one too. There was this one mention of this other thing. So that by itself is a competency. So there’s also a big conversation around what’s in what’s out. And if you’re starting from the bottom working your way up, you have kind of a logical way to do that. And we didn’t really talk about the top going down, but the top going down has that risk all over it because you may have acquired or developed a model that is not specifically to your business. So it has lots of things in it that you really have this draw gravitational pull to keep and not cleave out because it doesn’t apply. So I wonder about that difference in how a profession version of a competency model behaves differently in its actual application than a competency model might do in an organizational setting.
Amy DuVernet:
Yeah, I think it’s similar and difference. So Brian, your earlier point about developing certain competencies may not be critical to the business. It may not be important to invest dollars in training for this particular competency because it’s not going to make a huge difference in job performance. Or maybe most people hired into this role already have it. So it’s an important competence and we want people to have it, but we don’t need to develop it. So I think similar to that, it was important for us to identify all the competencies that could be necessary, and yet we may not develop courses for every single one of them in that there may not be a market for it. So our core strategy is to develop training managers, and if we can’t find enough folks to participate in a course, it’s not going to run. So not every competency is going to make it into the model or maybe not every competency is going to make it to a course, but we can still use that model throughout our organization. So for example, our fabulous editorial team run by Michelle and Sarah contributing can use that model as well to identify what areas they might want to recruit, recruit authors to write articles on where we might provide more of that informal means. I don’t know if that really got at what you were kind of mussing on, but I think there’s some similarities and some differences.
Brian Blecke:
I think that’s right, and I think that’s worthwhile for somebody who might be listening to this to contemplate because if I’m training industry, that purpose sets you up to go down that pathway in a certain manner. Whereas if I’m in a corporate setting, I don’t necessarily want extraneous. I don’t want to cover the full waterfall of all the possible competencies. I really want to narrow my point of view down to things that have the highest potential value in my setting. And you don’t know in a professional setting which context would care about one through four and in which context would care through nine through 12. So you’ve got to have all of them there available. And I think there’s a distinction there that needs to be considered because purpose drives that.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Amy, thank you so much for breaking down the Training Manager Competency Model and what all went into building that model. I know any listeners who are interested in learning more about the model or seeing the model, we will be linking to it in the show notes for this episode so they can check that out. So Training Industry recently launched a course on competency modeling. Can you share more about why Training Industry decided to launch a course on the topic?
Alyssa Kaszycki:
Yeah, that was based on a bunch research, probably unsurprisingly based on our explanation of where our competency model comes from. We surveyed our audience, we looked at those results based on a bunch of different things about our respondents: How long have they been in the training profession? What industry are they in, whatever it might be. And we just found that across all these different populations, competency modeling was a skill that a lot of training professionals felt like they needed more development in. And so what are we going to do? We’re going to make a course for them. And so that’s what we did is we worked with our audience, we worked with Brian and Kelly, we did a bunch of independent research and we tried to put something together that could get training managers up to speed on this thing that is being expected of them.
Amy DuVernet:
Yeah, absolutely. And to tie it back to how it ties to our Training Manager Competency Model, one of those seven core responsibilities of a training manager is identifying needs. Also, strategic alignment is one of the core responsibilities to making sure that your programs are strategically aligned to business needs and also evaluating performance. There are three core responsibilities that competency modeling as a competence or a skill set aligns really well with helping training managers perform those responsibilities or those tasks.
Kelly Smith:
And I’m sure it helps address to some extent that competency modeling does seem so daunting. There is a method, there is an approach. It can be daunting, but it’s doable and you just might need to be trained or figure out the best approach. And there’s lots of pros and cons and books and research and stuff that you can use to get there, but it’s not as daunting as maybe we made it seem through some of our conversations today.
Amy DuVernet:
I love that message, Kelly. Yeah, it’s accessible. It’s something that training managers and training professionals can do. And you’re right, it’s a systematic approach. So if you have your kind of step-by-step guide, you can work through it.
Sarah Gallo:
Absolutely. Love that. It is accessible. It can be done thanks to all of you helping share your insights and tips and resources. So I think that’s such an inspiring note to end on. So thank you all again for speaking with us today on the podcast. How can our listeners get in touch with you if they’d like to connect after the episode?
Brian Blecke:
Yeah, you can find us, Brian and Kelly also on LinkedIn through actiolearning.com website, actiolearning.com, and through training industries dot com’s website too. We’re on there too.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
To learn more about creating effective competency models for your organization, visit the show notes for this episode at trainingindustry.com/podcast.
Sarah Gallo:
And if you enjoyed today’s episode, let us know. Leave a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. We love hearing from you. Until next time.
Speaker 1:
If you have feedback about this episode or would like to suggest a topic for a future program, email us@trainingindustry.com or use the contact usPage@trainingindustry.com. Thanks for listening to the Training Industry podcast.
