PREFACE

Recent years have seen a significant increase in the use of personnel competency assessments within organisations. This trend derives from the understanding that a well-executed competency assessment programme can offer many and various benefits. A competency assessment programme, for example, can be used in the enhancement of:

• ‘best fit’ human resource allocation;

• professional development of employees;

• pay review processes;

• training requirements identification;

• customer assurance in tendering;

• ability to realize organisational capability.

If however a competency assessment programme is not well executed, if its implementation is ad hoc, then, like all powerful tools in ill-prepared hands, it can cause immense damage and all the areas of potential benefit could actually be adversely affected in the process.

Competency is a measure of an individual’s ability in terms of their knowledge, skills and behaviour to perform a given role. Competency assessment in an organisation, if carried out correctly, will be key to the organisation’s overall capability improvement and will lead to improved customer confidence. To be correct a competency assessment process must be:

• repeatable, so that comparison of results can be made;

• measurable, in measures that are documented, known and understood;

• based on best practice, traceable to standards and frameworks;

• transferable between frameworks, as an assessment process limited to a single framework will have limited application;

• tailorable, so that it can be modified for different organisations or for different sections within a single organisation.

This book defines an approach and a set of processes for competency assessment that satisfy these criteria – a set of powerful tools that can be used by an organisation to consolidate its competency assessment work into a coherent approach, allowing assessments against competencies from multiple frameworks to be undertaken.