Top 5 Ways of Competency-based Evaluation

Springboard conducted a recent survey of over 1,000 professionals to understand how skill gaps impact organizational growth. Their findings:

• About 70% of leaders had found skill gaps in their workplace.
• Around 40% of leaders are of the opinion that skill gaps in the workplace are ‘getting worse.’

According to the report, it is important to identify employees who require L&D in customized forms. But how can an organization identify who needs this program?

Competency-based evaluation (CBE) offers a solution to this. It helps organizations create employee skills profiles and identify skills gaps based on organizational requirements. Based on key skills, organizations can plan to reskill employees by building a personalized L&D plan. This way, they can close skill gaps, enhance team performance, and promote professional growth.

What is the Importance of Competency-Based Evaluation?

The competency-based evaluation assesses a professional's skills, knowledge, and abilities against a predetermined organizational standard.

The following are the reasons why this evaluation is important:

• Competency evaluation identifies whether the skill sets and performance of employees align with organizational requirements.
• After competency assessments, organizations can decide on hiring the right candidate who better fits their goals and culture and meets the requirements.

• After knowing their skills gaps, organizations can plan to build personalized L&D programs to make the company more resilient and future-proof.

Top 5 Ways of Competency-based Evaluation

Here are the most effective ways an organization can implement competency-based evaluation:

1. Identifying Key Competencies for Roles

Identifying the competencies for a professional role is the foundation of CBE. Competencies should include knowledge, skills, and behaviors aligning with the job.

While conducting competency assessments within an organization, HR professionals can consult with managers, leaders, and subject matter experts to understand key competencies. It helps them categorize these role-based competencies.

For example, in a full-stack developer role, key competencies may include:

• Technical Skills: Knowledge of JavaScript, Java or Python
• Soft Skills or Behavioral Skills: Collaboration, problem-solving, adaptability, etc.

After these identifications, HR professionals can prepare a competency framework. It will provide a benchmark for assessing employees.

2. Using Skill Assessments

Skill tests are the key tools for competency assessment. When selecting skill tests, organizations need to ensure that they align with the pre-determined competencies required for a job role. The tests should ideally simulate the practical scenarios the employee will face.

There are three different kinds of employee competency assessment organizations can arrange:

1. ‍Managerial Assessment: In this test, the manager reviews the performance.‍
2. 360-Degree Assessment: Managers and subordinates review and rate their performance in this test.‍
3. Self-Assessment: Employees go through this type of competency assessment to check their skills.

Further, all these tests can be categorized into: 

1. Knowledge-based (for measuring the understanding of an aspect)
2. Skill-based (for checking the employee’s ability to perform certain tasks)
3. Behavioral (for assessing an employee’s situational behavior)

Organizations can use iMocha’s Skill Assessment platform to benchmark the skills of new candidates they will hire or existing employees. It provides data-backed benchmarking so that organizations can make decisions regarding onboarding or training.

iMocha’s Skill Assessment library has over 3000 skill assessments, such as the Snowflake UI Skills Test, MySQL Workbench Skills Test, and AWS Kubernetes Test. These tests can help hiring managers understand the potential capability of candidates in different tech fields.

For example, an organization can conduct live coding interviews of candidates remotely before hiring. This will help the organization understand the candidate's logical and problem-solving skills.

3. Identifying Skills Gap Analysis

According to the Future of Jobs Report 2023 by the World Economic Forum, half of employees' core skills need to be updated every five years. Also, it has been estimated that by 2028, the skills of about 44% of employees will be disrupted.

These statistics show the importance of skill gap analysis. It will help organizations track employees' current capabilities, understand whether the workforce needs training, and implement the appropriate development efforts.

For example, an organization may have software engineers who lack DevOps competencies. The organization can arrange focused training to upskill them and bridge that gap.

4. Talent Mapping and Succession Planning

Talent mapping is the identification of talent or core competencies of employees within the team. Organizations need to develop Skill Profile of all employees with current skills, potential, experiences, and future skills required. It can help in understanding whether an employee’s skills align with the organizational goals and needs.

After this talent mapping, organizations can assess where their employees fit within the organizational hierarchy structure. They can identify high-potential employees, address their skill gaps, and plan for their succession into higher managerial roles.

In case a critical managerial position becomes vacant in the future, the pre-identified high-potential team member can step in.

5. Measure Evaluation Effectiveness

Measuring the evaluation's effectiveness is important. It reflects whether and how far the competency-based evaluation was successful.

Organizations can analyze the performance of participating employees pre and post-evaluation to assess their improvement.

For instance, if a developer's debugging skills improve after skill gap analysis and targeted training, it indicates that the assessment was effective.

Some of the quantitative metrics that organizations can track to measure this effectiveness are:

• Employee productivity
• Task completion rate
• Reduced time of project completion
• Revenue growth

Analyzing competencies and setting the right benchmark is a complex process that can be difficult to complete manually. This is why most organizations presently rely on competency assessment tools to simplify the evaluation.

What are the Benefits of Competency-Based Evaluation?

Organizations can achieve the following benefits with this evaluation:

• Develop an effective talent pipeline for the organization
• Have a proper understanding of the core competencies of the team
• Make plans to enhance the overall performance of team and organization
• Ensure data-based decision-making for employee promotion or growth
• Shorten the time for project completion

Conclusion

Competency-based evaluation is a powerful tool for checking whether employees are aligned with the company’s objectives. Businesses can also use it to hire the most potential candidates. By deploying this evaluation in the five ways mentioned above, they can create a future-ready workforce.

To streamline competency evaluation, organizations can use iMocha’s Skill Intelligence Cloud. This platform can give them AI-powered insights after a skill assessment. Organizations will be able to identify skill gaps and map talent precisely.

As a result, they can make better decisions regarding workforce planning, performance appraisal, and upskilling employees and emerge as a 'skill-first organization.'

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FAQs

What is competency-based evaluation?

Competency-based evaluation is the process of assessing the skills, knowledge, and behavioral aspects of employees or candidates to be hired. Its main objective is to identify whether a professional can use their knowledge and skill sets in practical situations in the required projects. Organizations can use this assessment to understand the present skills and skill gaps.

What are the methods of competency-based evaluation?

Several methods are available to conduct competency-based evaluation. These include Skills Evaluation, performance reviews, task-based monitoring, self-assessment, and competency-based interviews. Organizations can arrange a mix of these assessments to evaluate an employee or a potential candidate.

How do competency-based evaluations contribute to talent management?

This evaluation assesses whether the workforce's skills align with organizational requirements and objectives. It identifies employee skill gaps. As a result, organizations can take measures to reskill or upskill employees to become future-ready. It also helps in making the right decisions regarding talent mapping and succession planning.