Speaker 1: In this video, we'll cover advice and best practice when establishing the structure and detail of your competency framework. This advice draws from our years of industry experience and is applicable to any organisation, regardless of size or sector. Producing a well-structured competency framework is incredibly important as it makes the skills and competencies required for each and all areas of an organisation immediately recognisable. This in turn makes skill requirements easy to understand, adhere to and easily reportable. Organisations may also have more specific reasons for structuring a competency framework, for example, optimising or reducing unnecessary noise in data, for planning and restructuring the organisation or to prepare to implement a new competency management system. One of the biggest mistakes organisations make is for the competency framework to be developed in isolation. It's critically important that subject matter experts from around the organisation are invited to participate in its creation. Not only does this ensure that all subject areas are covered in appropriate detail, but it will also encourage buy-in and support when it's time to introduce the competency framework into the organisation. The content of a competency framework will be unique to each organisation. The reason for this is the varied skills and competency requirements of each organisation, influenced by the sector, the market it operates within, the clients it works with or even regulation and legislation. At its core, a competency framework is built around the skills and proficiencies that reside within it. The aim should be to include the following. Generic skills – skills that are common across either all people or large groups of people, for example, company induction and key policies. Advanced or technical skills – these are skills essential to a person's ability to fulfil their role in a proficient, unsupervised manner. Peripheral skills – whilst not directly related to roles or responsibilities, these may be important in certain circumstances, for example, first aid. These could be categorised as additional duties and responsibilities. Adherence – this relates to aspects revolving around safety or legal regulatory compliance, for example, adherence to policies and procedures. Soft skills – these relate more closely to how a person works, for example, listening skills, time management and creative thinking. They can often be related to attitude and behaviours or a person's core values. In this video, we use the term skills collectively to refer to anything that can be developed, managed and reported on. Descriptions – to clearly distinguish the purpose of each skill, we can add skill descriptions. This can include aims, objectives, outputs and goals. This defines the purpose and standard for each skill. Target levels – used to specify target levels for each skill against the role it's applicable to. This helps ensure that targets are clearly defined with no ambiguity. We'll look at examples of this in a future video. When populating a competency framework with skills, a sufficient level of detail needs to be captured to make reporting insightful and management of training requirements clear. For example, a skill or task could be broken down into smaller tasks, all of which are vital for safe and competent delivery of a process. If these smaller tasks need to be trained, managed and reported on, then each of these tasks should also be listed with their own metrics and supporting information. There are no rules about how to group or categorise skills. This decision should be made by your subject matter experts or steering committee. For example, you may group skills by task, process, machine or area. Aim to use short, concise titles, but include supporting information at a deeper level to provide clarity to people with lesser experience or knowledge. This is not concise and confuses the title with a description. Titles and descriptions should be separated to ensure that reporting is clear and concise. Any aims, objectives, outcomes and supporting information can then be defined and described separately. When defining the list of skills for the competency framework, avoid categorisation by job titles unless necessary. This is because many job roles may share common skills and can create unnecessary duplication in the framework. However, an exception to this is where a similarly named skill is used in a different context. For example, colleagues within Human Resources will use Microsoft Excel in a comparatively different manner to those in an engineering role. Whilst both groups could be competent using Excel, the context of the competence is likely to be different. Therefore, it may be better to create alternative titles with their own objectives that make the difference of context clearer. The target levels and outcomes can be more meaningful to their respective contexts. As mentioned already, if specific functionality is required in the organisation, then structure the titles appropriately. Subject matter experts will be able to effectively highlight and standardise any duplication. Competency frameworks often contain many different skills that all relate to the same underlying thing. Unless the context or application is different, they can be combined and standardised for consistency. Some skills may require a higher level of proficiency for certain roles in the organisation, such as their health and safety manager, who must be both an expert and trainer for other staff. There are two ways to identify skills that belong to an expert. One way is to use different target levels for the same skill, where the expert has the highest target level. Another option would be to create a separate skill that highlights the required expertise. Organisations usually opt for using skill levels as this reduces the number of skills in the framework. It's important to define standard levels of proficiency with definitions as this allows for accurate and powerful reporting to be achieved. This also removes any subjectivity when recording competency levels. We'll cover this in more depth in a future video. Once your framework skills are defined, you will need to associate them to job roles, therefore creating standard roles that people can be allocated to, people, where the skills are not part of a job role. There are no rules on how this should be done. You may link skills to job roles, responsibilities, geographical areas or directly to individuals. This will be determined by your sector, market and roles that people are allocated. Make sure that your competency framework is developed alongside the key stakeholders within the organisation, along with all the benefits that it will bring. You may encounter cultural barriers and resistance to change, but the standardisation and clearly defined outcomes of a well-structured competency framework will improve your organisation in so many ways.