The skills and competencies required for each job are changing in today’stoday’s fast-paced environment. Now, only a basic set of skills can’tcan’t help a person secure a good job. So, developing a varied set of skills that will help perform the job effectively and efficiently is paramount. Developing suitable competency, i.e., applying desired knowledge to complete the task at hand, is the need of the hour.

The competency profiling process helps identify what skills are needed to perform a particular job. It is the practice of determining the relevant competencies according to industry standards to perform the job with a certain degree of proficiency. Several skills management software is used to create the profiles. A competency profile is a document that summarises the qualifications, knowledge, and other proficiencies required for the job.

The competency profiling process is a multi-step procedure that begins with identifying a job’sjob’s goals and contacting key stakeholders such as managers and employees to determine the essential competencies required to do that position. All these inputs are then fed into skills management software, which results in the summary of key skills identified.

How does Competency profiling help?

  • The basis for recruitment: It provides the recruiter with a set of parameters that can be used to look for the desired candidates. It lists down the functions to be performed in a job and the skills that the person who will be taking up the job must possess to be successful in that role.
  • Identifying the gaps in skills of employees: By defining the requisite skills and characteristics of an ideal candidate briefly, competency profiling helps in identifying the gaps that the current employees may have, which is leading to underperformance, that can be bridged by providing the requisite training to the employees.
  • Development of training programmes: Identifying the right skill set also helps plan the future course of action. All the employee training and development programmes could be well designed, keeping in mind the profiling and addressing the future skills gaps that could arise in the requisite and present skillsets.
  • Minimise overlap in job roles: With the help of the competency profiling process, the manager can look at the overlapping job functions in two roles, and after this identification, these overlaps could be minimised by properly re-specifying the roles and responsibilities. Also, the different skillset of people can be better utilised by deploying them at job functions where work to be performed match their set of skills.

Having a clear knowledge about the organisation’sorganisation’s goals and objectives, one can clearly define the roles and responsibilities of a particular job function. These objectives can identify a set of competencies that will be critical to accomplishing these goals.

Competency profiling makes this job easy by summarising the key skill sets and makes recruiting and further retention of employees easy as employees keep receiving the required training and development opportunities.