Strategic competence management and operational skills management 

What is competence management necessary for?

Systematic competence management is fundamentally important in order to maintain the existing competitiveness and future viability of a company. The employees are the most important resource of every company and are crucial for the success or failure of the company. Therefore the dependence of the company's success on its employees should never be underestimated.
In many companies, the use, quality and availability of resources and means of production are very closely monitored and controlled. As a rule, there is a broad data basis on the use of capital and raw materials to determine key figures and derive optimization potential. However, many companies, especially small and medium-sized ones, do not have a comparable database for the development and further training of employees and their skills. However, a systematic collection of this information is of great importance in order to be able to efficiently deploy, develop and manage employees and their competencies.

How does successful competence management work?

The first step is to determine the current status. For this purpose, tasks and the corresponding competencies are defined and listed in detail. These competencies can be assigned with the help of a four-level expertise scale (no knowledge, connoisseur, expert, knowledgeable). With the help of questionnaires or employee interviews, these can be identified more easily. Care should be taken to obtain as complete a picture as possible of each employee's competencies. This is achieved by comparing the employee's own point of view with the views of colleagues and superiors.
Afterwards the target state is discussed and documented according to the same scheme in consultation with the management. The comparison of the target and actual status finally results in deviations which can be corrected by further training or solved by reassignment.

Opportunities and potentials of competence management

What opportunities arise for the company if the competencies of the employees are known and used correctly? First of all, the company becomes clear about the need and possession of competences and thereby creates transparency. This allows an efficient and targeted coverage of the need and a faster reaction to a change of certain requirements. Structured competence management enables personnel planning, recruiting and personnel development with foresight. Competence gaps can thus be anticipated and managed. Competence management can be used to add a qualitative component to what was previously purely quantitative personnel planning. The combination of costs and capacities with the concrete competence requirements allows conclusions to be drawn for targeted recruiting. In the context of personnel recruitment, for example, the transparency around the area and task-specific skills required can be used to define clear job profiles and make the process of advertising and applicant selection more efficient. In addition to personnel planning and recruitment, personnel development also benefits from competence management. Further development can be designed for individual employees along the corporate strategy as well as their personal and professional career path and can be clearly communicated in personnel development meetings. This facilitates the joint agreement of goals on the one hand and performance assessment on the other.

How is operational skills management implemented?

After recording the current employee competencies and determining the current status, the next step is to determine the target status. For this purpose, the target competencies are derived from the corporate strategy within the framework of a strategic analysis. In consultation with the management, it must be clearly defined how the company wants to position itself in the future. The development of the industry should also be taken into account here. For this purpose, studies by future institutes as well as aggregated data of innovative competitors from career portals can be used. The contents of the current and target competence mix are then brought together in a competence framework.
Operational skills management then uses the competence framework to support personnel selection, personnel development and personnel deployment, making it a core task of the HR department. It is clear that successful competence management is difficult to achieve without skills management.
Depending on the provider, competence management can also be implemented with software support and integrated into a comprehensive human capital management (HCM) solution.

Temporary co-driver: How we support you as 4C GROUP

We support our customers with our many years of experience in the field of human resources and work with them to establish a systematic competence management system. It is particularly important to us to provide you with a roadmap with which you can deploy your employees according to their abilities in the right place in the company. We reliably ensure the effective and efficient implementation of operational skills management.

If you too would like to create more transparency in your company with regard to your employee skills and would like to learn more about this topic, please contact our experts directly at heiko.mauterer∂4cgroup.com