The Project Academy focuses on helping companies improve their performance. When we decided to form a consortium to research the impact of competency management, we thought we would find that doing it well correlates with better corporate performance. We had no idea it would be far more than an incremental factor. The magnitude of what we found bowled us over.
On 21 September we released our ‘2015 Report on Trends in Competency Management’. The title and writing style may be dry, but for executives of big organizations the content is exciting.
A lot of people aren’t familiar with the term ‘competency management’ (CM). The concept is simple. CM assesses the skills and qualifications of workers, determines what’s needed to successfully fulfil roles in the organisation, and matches up workers with the roles they are best suited to perform.
The term ‘competency and capability management’ (CCM) discussed at length in the report goes a step farther. It includes capabilities (the ability to succeed). To do that, it folds in ‘soft skills’ and behavioural characteristics such as trustworthiness, leadership, influence and commercial awareness.
As you can imagine, much of this has historically been hard to quantify, so it has typically been evaluated by gut feel.
In our research, the consortium came up with a proprietary CCM Index. This allowed us to objectively rate and rank companies against each other even when their CCM methods differ considerably. To our surprise, the performance differential in any sector was not modest at all. Top performers outrun the average of their sectors by more than a factor of two, and in one sector by a factor of more than four.
We also found that the ‘sweet spots’ for making performance gains by improving CCM are not where investment is most prevalent–many companies do not focus at the levels where it can give the best return on investment.
Here at The Project Academy we have a track record of leveraging huge added value for our clients by helping them to manage the capability and competencies of their workforce. We work closely in partnership with our clients to understand their business and provide them with CCM metrics that really make a difference.
By applying our CCM methodology our clients can have confidence that business sectors, programmes and profit generation are in the heads of their most capable employees.