Competencies at Work

CHAPTER 1

The Underlying Principles of Competency Modeling

This chapter will provide a fundamental understanding of the why, what, and how of competency modeling. Let us start with the observation that all organizations have a very practical need to identify the criteria that define their ideal employee. Any leader who makes decisions about whom to hire, whom to promote, what skills to train, or how to appraise, implicitly assumes this ideal criteria. Defining this model employee—and creating a blueprint to replicate him or her—is an ongoing challenge dating back thousands of years. Indeed, two millennia ago the Chinese bureaucracy identified its ideal member as someone who could pass rigorous tests on the six arts of arithmetic, writing, music, ...