Using Human Performance Improvement Approaches for Competency Framework Development

An organization needed to develop a technical competency framework for a select group of employeesto help junior employees develop the skills necessary to perform at a higher level. A limited budget did not allow for a proper full-scale competency framework project. In addition, managers expressed doubts about the ability to capture the right kinds of skills needed for this technical job, which also involved a variety of soft skills. Nonetheless, there needed to be some form of reference to guide the development of junior employees, so in spite of its anticipated limitations, a decision was made to develop a competency framework.

Against this background, and with the constraints of time and resources, the challenge was to find an effective way to identify specific technical competencies. The key was to use an approach that could identify what suffices as opposed to what was exhaustive. This paradigm led to the use of human performance improvement (HPI) methods.

HPI approach

One of the key practices in the HPI approach is performance analysis. Since the intended objective of the competency framework was to aid in raising the junior employees' level of performance, this area of practice was logically most relevant. The key insight adopted for the project was the need to have a good understanding of the relationship between desired performance and the actual tasks undertaken by key performers. The implication of this insight was that conventional approaches for developing competency frameworks, such as focus group discussions involving anyone playing a relevant role, would no longer be suitable. Instead, a more targeted approach was needed, in which the careful identification of key performers would be critical.

The project team took special care to identify employees who had a track record of good performance. The plan was to interview the employees recognized as key performers, and through these interviews solicit the competencies that had contributed to their success.

Interview design and administration

Another key success factor for this project was the need to ask the right questions to solicit the required information. The interview questions were designed to reveal the relevant competencies that contributed to the interviewees' performance. As such, it was important to put those who were interviewed in the right frame of mind before asking more directly what they thought were key competencies. This resulted in the interview questions being broken up into three categories or sets.

The first set of questions centered on background or context information, such as who the employee reports to and what kinds of performance expectations were set. Next was a set of questions about key work processes or practices that allowed the employee to perform given her work context. Only after completing these two sets of questions were more direct questions asked about what an employee thought were key competencies.

Interviewers needed to conduct the interview professionally and be mindful not to influence the interviewee's response in any way. To this end, interviewers were briefed that they should stick to the questions and not provide their own opinion on any issue.

Post-interview work

After all the interviews were completed, transcripts were content-analyzed and coded. This analysis was followed by clustering similar competencies together, then framing the competency clusters in a logical sequence. A sequence approach was taken by the team because they felt a process framework would be more intuitive and therefore easier to communicate to the affected employees.

The result of adopting this approach was that there was no need for a full-scale competency framework project. Hence, this approach served its purpose by working within a tight budget. Another positive outcome of adopting the HPI approach was that the competency framework had more credibility since the skills identified were based on the practical real-life experiences of key performers.

A serendipitous outcome of adopting the HPI approach was that it became more evident that, in addition to having the right competencies, personality traits and personal attitudes significantly affected performance. This finding was based on interviewees' comments, as well as the interviewers' own observations of the key performers, and suggested that having a good competency framework to develop the more junior employees was only part of the solution. The other was to pay close attention to the recruitment and selection process.