A competency framework is a set of roles, succession roles, skills, skill levels and behaviours that are essential for each role in an organization. It defines a statement for each skill level so its easier to accurately measure how to measure and observe them in action.

It can also be extended to show career pathways, the paths which can be taken from one role to another more senior role. By understanding what these skills gaps are we can more easily close these gaps by taking training and by executing in the day to day.

What advantages does it bring if you have a competency framework?

Having this underlying framework creates a data-based foundation for you to build your individual employee career development plans and succession planning.

In practical terms it enables you to visualise skill gaps across the organisation and see single person dependencies – for example where you have only one person with that particular level of skill so you can train others to remove risk or losing that capability altogether.

Overall having a competency framework enables you to employ a data driven approach to employee development and succession planning and this improves transparency, consistency, reduces bias and increases visibility for every member of the organization.  It also helps you connect career pathways to learning pathways more easily and can provide a more accurate hiring process, reducing mis-hires.

So why haven’t more organizations got this?

The simple answer is that it is very complex and time consuming to create and maintain a competency framework. As beneficial as it is, running a competency framework has largely the realm of large enterprise and beyond the resources and capabilities of many small to medium sized organizations. There are existing frameworks available, but these are either overly complex or too vanilla to be deployed effectively.  

Even for organisations that have got one, the average time to create a competency framework for a 300-employee organization is 6-9 months and requires at least one full time person, using an L&D manager to maintain it. This puts of many people from implementing one.

That is, until now.

Recent advances in technology aided by AI, particularly by a UK tech company called StaffCircle® has brought this capability into the reach of small and medium sized organizations. Hyper personalized competency frameworks – individualised for each organisation can now be created in a matter of minutes.

What used to take 6-9 months to create now takes as little as 20 minutes.

Welcome to the future of AI Assistant Employee Development.