Competence management is a very comprehensive topic that causes stomach aches for many managers in companies. It can be confusing due to the many different approaches, but once you look at the basics in a clear and structured way, it’s pretty simple, helpful, and can even be fun. We hope this article brings a little more clarity to the topic and all the important basics about it.
Definition of Competencies
Unfortunately, the term “competence” has many different definitions in today’s world, which often leads to confusion or ambiguity. Even science has not yet been able to agree on a single common definition.
The word is derived from the Latin origin competencia and means something like “to be suitable, capable or authorized to do something”. In particular, this is about the voluntary, self-organized and creative action of a person, who includes his or her own abilities, resources, values and attitudes.
In the professional sense, it is about being able to master situations professionally and meet subject-specific requirements through the skills and abilities that you have acquired. However, the distinction from the term “qualification” should be observed here, as a competence is inseparably linked to the person, which is not the case with a qualification. In addition, competent action means taking responsibility for oneself, others and the matter itself at the same time.
In general terms, the word competence describes the use of one’s own resources (knowledge, skills and abilities) in order to meet the special requirements of different situations in a responsible and solution-oriented manner and to master them.
Why Should You Deal with Competence Management?
Due to the changes in the labor market and increasing digitalization, an ever faster and more frequent development of the workforce in companies is required. The new and constantly changing demands of the work tasks also require new skills.
The problem is often that the management of a company assumes that it knows its employees and their competencies and that this is transparent for everyone. Nevertheless, it often happens that top performers leave the company, the position cannot be filled in time and thus important knowledge is lost to the company. In the worst case, this position will be misfilled, because in the end it was no longer entirely clear which competencies the previous employee actually had and which will be urgently needed in the future.
Competence management should help to clearly determine and determine where which competencies are needed in the company and which competencies each individual employee brings to the table at which point. Only if this is clear can staff be hired or developed accordingly. If you are thinking about professionalizing your personnel development, you should also think about competence management, as this is a logical step to proceed strategically.
When developing a suitable strategy for the organization, both the “outside-in” and the “inside-out” perspective should be taken into account.
- The “outsite-in” view deals with the requirements that could be placed on a company by the outside world externally, now and in the future, and what competencies are available internally or need to be developed to meet them.
- The “inside-out” perspective works the other way around. This means that it looks at what the company can offer the outside world with its existing competencies, what added value, innovations or progress can be generated for the stakeholder group.
In addition to these two perspectives, you should also have a rough understanding of the distinction between strategic and operational competence management.
Strategic Competence Management
This serves to answer the questions just mentioned, to develop appropriate measures for adapting competence needs, to accompany this implementation and finally to evaluate or measure their impact. It can also be understood as goal-oriented learning of the organization.
Operational Competence Management
It is intended to create transparency about currently existing competencies and to guarantee their preservation and further development. In close cooperation with the managers, the necessary departmental, team- or employee-related competence requirements are developed and compared with the existing competencies of the employees. In this way, development needs and potential can be determined at employee and company level.
Benefits of Competence Management
Most of the time, this topic immediately brings advantages to companies, as it helps them to better identify and cover competence needs, which ultimately has a positive effect on the company’s success. However, competence management not only benefits the company, but also the individual employees. After all, those who deal with competencies analyze and reflect on their own abilities and skills, discover new interests and development needs, and thus advance their own professional development. In this way, it enables you to better manage and prepare your professional career, to develop new skills bit by bit and to gain knowledge that will help you move forward. If you know exactly what you can do, you have at least a certain security and orientation in a constantly changing world of work with new requirements.
But what happens after all the analysis and determination of needs?
What are Competency Models?
When dealing with competence management and determining all existing competencies among all employees in the company as well as future needs, the results should also be recorded. For this purpose, competence models can be created, as they serve to clearly present and describe competencies. We will cover more details on this topic in our next blog post.
From our point of view, these were the most important basics of competence management. Now you know what competencies are, why you should deal with their management and what competency models actually are. That’s a good start. Further important aspects of the competence models as well as further exciting information will follow in our next blog post.
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