6. What are the advantages for an enterprise with competency-based training?

Enterprises have begun to admit that their main source of differentiation and competitiveness is their people. Each day there appear more experiences of business organisations that direct their competitive efforts to strengthening their human assets. Generating spaces that promote innovation and lifelong learning are objectives that are supported by training processes aimed at developing labour competencies.

The approach on competencies facilitates personnel selection greatly, since the selection may be founded on proved skills and no longer on diplomas. The new lines in terms of incorporating effective personnel are drawn upon the basis of competency-based profiles. The simplification of stuffed and often inoperative descriptions of job positions is highly facilitated by the use of concepts such as levels of performance and areas of competency, rather than the traditional and overused way of baptising positions and creating unnecessary differences among collaborators who interact at similar levels withhigh levels of interdependence.

Workers training is more easily identified and provided when mechanisms of competency assessment are employed on them, thus facilitating the identification of those competencies that are to be developed in each case, and therefore, the training actions that are required. Many entrepreneurial training programmes often end up with the easy and inefficient recipe formula which, on account of its repetitiveness, only manages to provide resources in the form of time and money, but they do not imply further progress in the view of workers.

Some enterprises, in the countries that have labour competency systems, have managed to relate their remuneration and incentive policies to competency-based models of human resources management. Such models associate competencies achievement with compensation mechanisms. This field, however, still remains to be explored and poses great challenges. One of the points of higher tension lies on the belief that a certificate of competency should directly allow its bearer to receive an additional compensation. This utterly simplistic argument could persuade many enterprises not to implement a competency-based system.

Many enterprises are beginning to use and demand an interesting practice. It consists of measuring the variation that an action of training and competency development may produce in productivity. Apart from SIMAPRO(1) methodology – already mentioned above – there are other applications such as the ones developed by SENCE of Chile,(2) which consisted in measuring specific cases to verify the impact of training in productivity by employing econometric techniques.

 

 

 

 

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1 Mertens, Leonard, Productivity…, op. cit., Montevideo, Cinterfor/ILO, 2004.
2 Soto, E. et al., Evaluación del impacto de la capacitación en la productividad, Santiago de Chile, SOFOFA, SENCE, FUNDES, 2003.

 

 

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