Competency, Class and Element: Competency is the measure by which you evaluate the performance potential of employees. Competency indicates the quantum of skills, knowledge and behavioral traits in an employee that facilitate better performance in a task or assignment. It has substituted the term skills, reflecting recent HR thinking, where skills constitute only a portion of competency.

A competency element refers to any unique, identifiable and ratable skill, knowledge or behavioral trait.

A competency class refers to any set of closely related competency elements that can be grouped under a single category, for example the competency elements Self-Motivation, Interpersonal Skills and Positive Attitude can be grouped under the competency class Behavioral Traits.

A group of related competency classes make up a Competency, required for effective performance in a task, or assignment.

Editing Competency Element Information: Through this activity you can edit the details of the competency element. However, the code assigned to a competency element is unique to the particular element and cannot be edited. The other details you can edit are,

• The competency class to which the competency element belongs.

• The short and long descriptions of the competency element.

• The trainable status of the competency element.

•  The active/inactive status of the competency element.

• The minimum desired level of the competency element.

• The comments entered pertaining the competency element details.

Minimum Desired Level: The minimum desired level(MDL) of a competency indicates the minimum extent to which the competency must be present in an employee. For example, if the MDL for the competency Communication Skills is 3 or 4, it indicates the minimum extent to which the competency must be present in the employee. In this example, the maximum value of the competency is set as 5, in the system parameters.

Active or Inactive: You can decide whether the competency element is to be in the Active status, which means that the element can be used by other activities.

Trainable: If you indicate it as trainable, this competency element will be made available to the Training component as a competency element that necessitates training.

Language: The system also gives the flexibility of viewing and editing the competency element details in any of the available languages.

Getting familiar with the pages inside

Prerequisites:

Definition of competency elements.

What you can do in this activity

Edit short and long descriptions of the Competency Element Information

Edit the minimum desired level of the competency element

Edit the active/inactive status of the details

Edit the trainable nature of the competency element

Edit the additional comments if any.

Editing the short and long descriptions of the competency element

To edit the descriptions,

• Go to Edit Competency Element page.

• Specify the details in the corresponding fields.

Assigning competency element to a competency class

Competency elements are the constituents of different competency classes like knowledge, skills etc.

To assign a competency class to the competency element

• Go to Edit Competency Element page.

• Select from the Competency Class Description drop-down list box the competency class to which you want to assign the competency element.

Activating/Deactivating competency element details

The system provides the flexibility of activating or deactivating the competency element details whenever necessary. If the details are in active status, if means that they can be used in other activities. If you choose to deactivate the details, the competency element will not be available for use in other activities.

To activate/deactivate the details

• Go to Edit Competency Element page.

• Select the Inactive check box to inactivate the details.

• Note that blank check box indicates that the details are in active status.

Specifying the trainable nature of the competency element

The trainable nature of the competency element indicates if the employees can be given training to improve their proficiency levels in the competency element or otherwise. For example, if the competency element is Programming Skills, you can indicate if it is trainable.

To indicate the trainable nature of the competency element,

• Go to Edit Competency Element page.

• Select the Trainable check box to indicate if the competency element is trainable.

• Note that a blank check box indicates that the competency element is not trainable.

Specifying the minimum desired level of the competency element

Minimum desired level indicates the minimum extent to which the employee should be proficient in the competency element against a maximum value set in the process parameters during deployment. For example, if the competency element is Communication Skills and if the maximum value is set as 120 in the process parameters, you can indicate the minimum desired level as 35, 40 etc.

To specify the minimum desired level,

• Go to Edit Competency Element page.

• Specify the value in the corresponding field.

Editing the comments