Employee Competency

Employee Competency

Succeeding in the world’s most competitive market requires extraordinary efforts from extraordinary people. An employee becomes extraordinary by being competent and motivated to thrive his organization to success. To build a culture based on “winning every day” concept, managers need to make excellent strategies. To implement these excellent strategies employees should be directed in the same path. A successful organization is one with high performance, focused, and determined to win every single day. To win every day, knowing the market structure, getting the priorities right, knowing about competitors and having competent and highly motivated employees is vital.

What is Employee Competency?

To be successful in the current rapidly changing world, we need to maximize the productivity of all the resources in the organisation. Among the resources that make an impact on the organisation, human resources is one that directly and strongly influences the organisational productivity.

“Competencies are arranged into a framework that brings together a number of job roles and the required capabilities that the job holder must possess or acquire in order to perform his job effectively” (Dillion, 2019).

Employees, being an asset to the organisation should suit the requirements of the organization in every possible way. Hence, right recruitments propagate the seeds for a growing workforce that is competent and harvests excellent results. By using competencies an organisation can rationalize the hiring process and eliminate unintended bias. To eliminate bias, competencies should be identified early in the recruitment process and this can be strained from the job description and job specifications.

Model for Employee Competency

Types and the degree to which a certain employee competency is required vary by job and industry. Therefore Competency models may take a variety of forms based on different elements. However there are some common attributes that an employee should possess in order to meet the higher standards prerequisite by an organization.

                                     Figure 1: Model for Employee Competency

a) Intellectual Competencies

Intellectual Competencies includes skills that is required to perform a job perfectly. This can be industry knowledge, background and expertise. For an example, an accountant needs to be good with numbers whereas a writer needs to have strong spelling, grammar and punctuation skills. “Intellectual leadership competency is intended to achieve high performance project outcomes with optimistic business results” (Ahmed 2017).

 b)  Leadership Competencies

Some of the competencies needed to lead and direct others towards goal achievement are exceptional communication and listening skills, rapport building, commitment, dedication, effective feedback, conflict resolution, analytical skills, prudence and decision making. A good leader has a clear vision of where to go and how to achieve their targets while effectively utilizing available resources.

c)  Interpersonal Competencies

Interpersonal competencies include skills required to get along effectively with others. Relationship management, problem solving, building trust, communication, accountability, listening, showing appreciation, flexibility are some of the interpersonal skills required to work effectively and efficiently.

Maintaining Competence

Firms are required to assess the competence of their employees and continue to assess their training needs on a regular basis. Further they must not only consider changes in the marketplace, product positioning, market capitalization and portfolios, but also consider the skills, expertise, technical knowledge and behavior of their employees and their ability to apply these in practice.

Attracting and sustaining the right people to the organisation makes all the difference in running a productive and successful cultural organisation. Hence attracting competent new employees is equally important as retaining existing ones. Therefore an organisation with competent and well-equipped workforce provides a competitive edge over all the other organisations in an industry and drives it towards success.

References

Ahmed, R. (2017). Impact of Project Managers’ Intellectual Competencies on Project Success. SSRN Electronic Journal, pp.2-3.

Daft, R. (2003). Management, 6^th edition, U.S., Thomson learning.

Dillon, S. (2019). What Are Workplace Competencies?. [online] Smallbusiness.chron.com. Available at: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/workplace-competencies-46820.html [Accessed 1 Apr. 2019].