Competencies

Competencies are building blocks of successful behavior. A competency is a skill or ability you possess. Among other things, competencies and competency profiles can help you measure how suitable an employee is for a specific task or position. Competency-based work is fully supported in our HR software.

Virtually every industry (and even every organization) uses its own competencies. Because we serve clients in virtually every industry, we have already developed many competencies and indicators. We provide 400+ competency profiles for a very wide range of common jobs and functions. However, you are encouraged to bring your own (or adapt ours).

Working with competencies

You can work with competencies in DDGC and compile competency profiles based on them. Technically, these are interview forms with a checklist that can be filled out by one or more persons. Working with competencies can add considerable depth to personnel conversations because it goes beyond a job description and is much more dynamic than a task description. 

Using competencies brings up (often unspoken) mutual expectations. By naming concrete behaviors and working systematically to develop them, employee performance can be demonstrably improved. The extent to which an employee is competent for a task or position is determined in part by the following aspects.

• Knowledge (know) - A person must have or master certain knowledge.
• Skills (can) - The way in which someone masters skills and can vary in them.
• Motivation (want) - The degree of motivation for an (often) changing task.
• Personality traits (be) - The disposition a person has to handle things in a certain way.

Competency profile structure

Working with competencies provides support because it offers clear points of leverage to steer behavior and results. To do that, desired functioning must be translated into concrete behavior: the knowledge content, technical and behavioral skills and attitude. All behaviors that determine this are described. The degree to which these are achieved determines the success of the organization as well as the performance of the employee concerned (organizational strategy and Human Resource management are linked). The first step is to clarify those desirable behaviors by including them in a competency profile.

The competency profile has a relationship with the above descriptions, but more explicitly indicates which skills belong to the task and job description and which grades can act as indicators. A competency profile generally consists of several competencies. Each competency has the following structure.

• Competency - The skill that an employee must possess. These should be unambiguous and recognizable to supervisors and management.
• Description - Textual explanation of the competency.
• Indicators - Examples of behavior that make concrete to what extent an employee has the formulated competency.