Set up competencies

A skill says somebody can do one thing. A competency groups skills into a ladder of levels — Trainee, Competent, Expert — and says which rung a job title needs. It is how “has the right skills for the role” becomes a single answer instead of a list you read across.

Find it under Manage → Competencies. It needs the Performance feature and the manage-skill permission.

Before you start

Competencies are built out of skills that already exist. You cannot invent a skill here. Build the skill library first — see Manage the skill library — and get the levels right there, because a competency level referring to a yes/no skill can only ask whether it was achieved, while a levelled skill can ask for a minimum.

Building one

1. Choose New competency and give it a name and a description.
2. Set Skills required to pass a level. This is a percentage: 100 means every skill at that level must be met, 60 means most of them. Each level then shows you how many of its skills that works out as.
3. Decide whether levels must be achieved in order. With it off, somebody can hold Level 3 without Level 2, and the page shows exactly which levels they hold.
4. Add levels with Add level, then expand each one to set its label, description and skills.

A level with no skills cannot be achieved by anybody, and the form says so rather than letting you save a rung nobody can reach.

For a large framework, Import takes one row per competency, level and skill, repeating the competency and level values on every row belonging to them. The import is all-or-nothing: if any row has an error, nothing is imported, so you fix the report and run it again rather than hunting for what partly landed.

Attaching it to a job title

A competency applies to nobody until a job title asks for it. On the job title, add the competency and the level it requires, and mark whether it is essential and how urgent the gap is. Anybody in that role below the required level then shows as a gap on the competency report.

What editing one does to people who already hold it

This is the part worth reading before you change a live competency.

Changing the pass threshold, reordering levels, adding or deleting a level, or adding or removing a skill is a structural change, and the form shows you its impact before you commit: how many people would drop a level, and how many sign-offs would be affected.

Two things then happen when you apply it.

Existing assessor sign-offs are invalidated, not deleted. They are marked as needing review and appear on the Competencies tab of Briefing for somebody to confirm or remove. Nobody’s sign-off disappears quietly because the competency underneath it moved.

Everyone holding the competency is re-evaluated in the background. The recalculation is queued rather than immediate, so the report can lag the save by a short while. If the numbers look unchanged straight after an edit, give it a moment before concluding something is wrong.

Deleting a level invalidates only the sign-offs pointing at that level, and the remaining levels are renumbered so there is no gap in the ladder.

Deleting a competency

Deleting takes its levels, its skill requirements, its job-title requirements and its assessor sign-offs with it. The skills themselves are not affected — they stay in the skill library, and anything else using them is untouched.

To see where people stand against what you have built, use the Competencies tab in Briefing reports.