Competency Profiling

• Competency profiling identifies the skills required for effectiveness in a job role.
• An essential step before assessing candidates to fill a position.
• Useful for fairly static roles or environments that are not changing rapidly.
• It is not enough to look at past effectiveness in rapidly changing markets.
• Rapid change often means starting with a blank sheet of paper.
• New strategies require new skills for future success
• Role overlap and ambiguity require less directly role related competency profiles.
• As organizations strive to be more entrepreneurial, uncritical application of competency profiling should be questioned.
• Entrepreneurial organizations may want staff to create their own form of contribution.
• An new trend may be to see competency profiling as overly controlling and static - best limited to less dynamic roles.
• The result may be less certainty about how to predict what type of person will be effective in a role.
• Still, the assessment of candidates presupposes having some idea about what is required for success in the target role.
• And businesses expect so much of managers now that they can ill afford to take a chance on choosing the wrong person.
• Competencies like the ability to cope with ambiguity, to take initiative in uncertain situations and to cope with stress are becoming more important.
• These competencies relate to emotional intelligence - the ability to retain control of yourself under pressures of various sorts - whether time pressure, excess workload, fast shifting expectations, angry colleagues, or the stress of ambiguity.