Looking for ideas or examples of training on competencies. How, who (trains it, receives it), and when? I recently heard a speaker indicate that he has created training and development "tracks" based off of their competencies that employees were required and some were optional to attend. Can anyone provide any guidance on how to go about doing this from scratch, any success stories, or information/examples you could share? I'm the training manager for a 440 employee, 1.4 billion dollar financial institution, spanning three hours away from the central location.

Thanks for any help or assistance!

Hi Chase:

Check out The International Board of Standards for Training, Performance and Instruction ( ibstpi®) @ IBSTPI

Good luck!

Cj

Chase-

Let me try to take some of the complexity out of this.
Competence - What it takes to do a job well.
Skill - The ability to do a job well.
Training - The method of acquiring the skill that enables you to do a job well.

Example:
Competence - Business analysis
Skills - Ability to read a P & L, Excel
Training - How to Read a P & L, Excel Level 1, 2, 3.

Tracks enable multiple employees to take the same trainings for the purpose of their specific job or in order to be elegible for another job. It's very similar to a graduate school curriculum.

Hope this helps a bit.

Hello. One of my clients and I presented about a similar project at the ASTD 2007 and Training 2008 conferences. The handout showing the model we created is still on ASTD's website. You can access it here, Conference Handout. Note that the content is pretty brief because the client didn't want to include specific data from the project.

As you proceed with your own project, you may find there are discrepancies in the competencies people think are important. It is vital to get everyone to agree on these upfront. Otherwise you can waste a lot of time and effort. We interviewed leadership and key workers separately and then distributed our findings back to each of them for discussion and agreement. Once we knew what skills and competencies the business considered important, we could work on grouping, ranking, and then evaluating each of them to see where the biggest potentials for improvement resided.

We based our project approach on finding skill commonalities between job roles, then analyzing current and desired performance for those skills, and then mapping out what training currently existed and needed to be created to raise the critical skills that were found most lacking. The plan is to keep repeating the process as critical skill gaps are addressed so that training (or other interventions) are developed for the next biggest gaps and so on down the line. This allows you to not have to address everything at once.

We did list certain courses as required or optional. Basically, courses addressing key skills or needs are required. Optional courses are those that address lesser ranked skills or skills where the client felt they were already strong performers.

For an effective method to distribute the resulting job roles and curriculums, you might consider an electronic interface launchable from your Intranet. An associate can locate their job role and then drill down to see what courses are needed (including what is required and optional). Taking it online will make it more accessible and maintainable.

Hope this helps.