Competency Analysis Tool – Competency Mapping

As competency analysis tools have become an integral concept highly advertised in business, it has simultaneously become increasingly misconstrued. Contrary to many beliefs, competency analysis does not lay emphasis on creating core competencies but rather focusses on recognizing the core competencies already at play and reducing emphasis on actions that are not.

Simply put competency analysis is an analysis of the competencies of a given corporation, fundamentally asking, what edge it has over others in the market-space? In order for an action to qualify as a competency, it should be recognized not only as something the corporation does better than most i.e. its effectiveness, but also more efficiently than most i.e. its efficiency. These actions that a company does better than most are nothing but its core competencies.

Core competencies essentially have three characteristics that distinguish them from noncore competencies.

1. Firstly, a core competency must contribute to what makes the corporation’s products or services unique and thus sought-after.
2. Secondly, core competencies are not imitable; this is how a business can offer that unique experince and generate profit from it.
3. Lastly, it should have a wide-ranging application; a core competency does not emphasize on smaller, niche markets.

Competency analysis tool is a powerful way used to gauge the knowledge, skills and process capabilities essential for a company to be able to offer its products or services. While competency analysis is largely applied to production settings, this type of analysis can form the backbone for various practices within the business and can be accomplished at a product, project or even a corporation level. In order to conduct a competency analysis exercise, it makes sense to start by listing what steps or actions are required to produce the products/services the business offers.

This produces a generic structured list in terms of how a product is made. The items mentioned on this list are then broken down to get to granular steps that form the basis for each action, creating something of a map or plan per se. These could be thought of as enablers to the competency, something which makes a good case towards the need for a Competency analysis tool.

Once the map of how the process flows is completed, the next step could be to begin fashioning a second map of how the process should run – a step which is similar to a need-gap analysis which allows the analyst to quantify, examine and forecast the future capabilities of the process and recognize how the efficacy of a process can be sustained. This is similar to identifying “areas for growth” and suggestions for how to go about doing that.

The company is now ready to create the process standards essential to realize the set competencies and to implement any changes. A Competency analysis tool has many benefits. It clarifies employee expectations and works in tandem to recognize and do away with waste actions, thereby cultivating efficiency. Additionally, it pinpoints areas for development before major issues come up as well. In a nutshell, competency-based assessments are not a new revolution or trend but an overall good practice to implement.