Active Competence Management: Door Opener for a Successful Future
Digital transformation places new and different demands on employees. So how can companies help their employees meet these challenges?
The knowledge-based society involves a change of paradigms. Pure technical and methodological knowledge is no longer sufficient to meet the challenges of the future. What is more important is how employees use their skills to tackle problems in practice, especially in complex situations. This requires new learning spaces and concepts through further training – and the introduction of systematic competence management.
Competencies are Not “Skills”
The basis for competence management is a competence model that lists or groups existing and required competences. A competency model consists of a set of key competences selected in accordance with a company’s business objectives.
These may include:
- Professional competence: Specific knowledge, skills or abilities required to carry out professional tasks.
- Methodological competence: The ability to tackle tasks and problems in a structured and effective manner. Learned working methods or solution strategies must be able to be applied and further developed independently.
- Social competence: This is becoming increasingly important in the distributed world of work and self-organised work and includes all skills that are effective in relationships with other people.
- Personality competence: This allows a person to act in a self-organised and reflexive manner. This requires the ability to assess oneself, to develop one’s own talents and to develop creatively.
- Leadership competence: Developing organisational requirements, initiating change, guiding and enabling employees and teams belong in this area. This also includes reviewing performances and providing constructive feedback.
The last example shows that competence clusters cannot be viewed absolutely separately, because a portion of social competence is necessary for constructive feedback.
How to Succeed at Competence Management
Competence management reflects the corporate strategy. It is therefore essential that the company has a clear plan of what business goals it pursues, how it can achieve these goals and what competences it needs to achieve them.
It makes sense to set up a competence management system as a strategic staff unit within the company. It can provide information on targeted learning opportunities for skills development with the aim of improving individual and organisational performance in order to achieve better business results.
Training without added value for the company is a thing of the past. With an effective competence management system, critical skills gaps are more quickly identified and closed. Experience has also shown that effective competence management also increases satisfaction among employees and managers, which benefits the corporate climate, team motivation and thus productivity.
To find out more about setting up a competence management system, contact our experts:
This article first appeared on TR Academy. Click here to read the full article.