Competency-Based Training

Competency-based training is 1 of the newest buzz phrases. But what is it? How can I implement it? It's simple and easy to fully grasp and, by following a couple of straightforward actions, your personnel can be armed with the knowledge they will need to do their jobs.

Do not let the terminology scare you. A competency is just a set of understanding, abilities, or abilities (KSA's) that an employee should use to function on the job. In recent years, we've noticed a gradual move to working with competencies from job descriptions in training. This kind of coaching ensures that your workers get only the "need to know" data instead of "good to know" details. To develop a competency-based program, initially function with HR to make confident that the job descriptions consist of the right knowledge, expertise, and skills - that's the foundation. Once this foundation is complete, you will locate it is fairly quick to establish competency-based coaching - if you follow a couple of effortless actions.

The first step must be to assemble a group of staff who are at the moment carrying out the job that you need to train. This group of subject matter professionals (SME's)should be a mix of high performers, managers, and supervisors. Get the SME group together and aid them identify the understanding, skills, and skills necessary to function in their jobs. For example, bank tellers could possibly need to have expertise in basic financial tasks, regulations, systems, and customer service. The SME group can take every competency, discussing all of the expertise, skills, and abilities in that competency. In fundamental finance, for example, bank tellers may possibly need to know standard addition and subtraction, how to total a deposit slip, and how to instruct a client to balance his or her checkbook. This is a rather simple example, but the result of breaking down the competencies gives you the objectives for coaching. There is a hidden benefit to approaching competency-based coaching this way: once the competencies are identified and broken down, you can ask executive managers to approve what you have come up with. Getting the involvement of executive managers almost guarantees their acquire-in - and could make your job considerably simpler.

Now that you've identified and broken down the competencies, you can get started making coaching from those individual competencies. Let's go back to the bank teller example: course number 1 can be a module on fundamental math, document completion, and checkbook balancing. With that module, you've given the bank teller the tools required to total fundamental economic tasks. Moving via the competencies, and with the SME group approving every single set of KSA's, you'll able to make coaching that's important to your employees' good results on the job.

When the training is "live", you can measure its effectiveness. You can do this by introducing surveys to the trained staff and their supervisors. Utilizing our bank teller example, we could survey new workers at a designated interval, generally 45 to 60 days. In the survey, we'll concentrate our questions on the training objectives, which came directly from the competencies. We'll ask the new employ tellers if they really feel comfy performing the fundamental math that was explained in training. On the other hand, we'll ask the supervisors if they've observed the new hire's capability to perform basic math. We can ask them to rate the new hire's capability on a scale. If a majority of new hires report no complications with simple math and their supervisors tell us that they have couple of errors and few questions on the topic, we've effectively trained the competency. If, on the other hand, there's some discomfort and a lot of errors, we can go back to the competency itself, the training, or even the coaching instructor to uncover the challenge.

By implementing a competency-based coaching program, you're linking coaching to the job. You're ensuring that trainees are receiving the info they need to have to function, and not additional details that does not honestly impact their job performance. You're also setting up the path to greater efficiency evaluation. If you're specific that trainees are getting created based on job-certain information, you can use the information, abilities, and skills introduced in training to measure and reward their efficiency.