Competency Orientation within Companies: The Challenge of Different Requirements

Andreas Schmidt, Christine Kunzmann

Competency Orientation within

Companies: The Challenge of

Different Requirements

Stuttgart, 28. September 2009

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies

andreas.schmidt@fzi.dehttp://andreas.schmidt.name

http://mature-ip.eu

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Competence Management is a good idea…

Competence Management allows for systematic competency-oriented human resource development• More targeted, more efficient, more strategical planning

Competencies are a good way of describing dispositions of human behavior• For team composition• For applicant selection• And for finding the right person to talk to

MATURE - Continuous Social Learning in Knowledge Networks

3Christine Kunzmann [kontakt@christine-kunzmann.de] - Andreas Schmidt [andreas.schmidt@fzi.de] •3

… and you can do a lot more …

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Challenges to the notion of „competency“

Competencies are cultural abstractions• including professional culture & corporate culture

Competency definitions are implicitly contextualized• many assumptions are not made explicit,

certain degree of ambiguity will always remain.

Competency definitions are purpose-driven conceptualizations, • specifics of the different use cases

Competencies are time-dependent conceptualizations• they need to evolve in a timely way in order to stay relevant

and useful.

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Professional Learning Ontology

Bringing togetherKM, CompetenceManagement,and E-Learning

Available atprofessional-learning.eu

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Use Cases

Use case Requirements Notions People findingFinding help on a problemCommunity formation

Timely inclusion of emerging topics InterestExperience

Team staffingApplication selectionMatching requirement and actual profiles

Sufficiently level of detail in combination with relationships for similarity measures

ExperienceCompetencyPotential

Training planningHuman resource developmentIdentifying development needs and selecting measures

Sufficient level of detail, corresponding to the granularity of measures

CompetencyLearning outcomes

Learning on demand supportSuggesting learning opportunities within the work process

Fine grained descriptions of what is relevant for a certain situation

TopicsCompetency

Reward schemesCareer planning

Very reliable measurements through key performance indicatorsLower level of detail

Competency(Potential)

Aligning employee competence development with corporate strategies

Small set of stable competences Aggregated competence

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Revised understanding of competency modeling

as a continuous process

with different levels of formality co-existing at the same time

and as a social process in which we need the participation of many to come to stable, generally accepted competence definitions

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Competence Catalog Maturing

MATURE - Continuous Social Learning in Knowledge NetworksBraun & Schmidt 2008

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Closed feedback loops were a good idea…

10MATURE - Continuous Social Learning in Knowledge Networks

Summary

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Summary: Challenges

How do we define a framework in which evolution can take place and still have the possibility of some form of interoperability? • How can semantic relationships (like “refines”, “is-subset-

of”, “supersedes”) help as part of such a framework?

How do we account for the different and emerging requirements of competency-oriented use cases?

How can we support smooth transitions between those use cases so that the promise of a “common currency” for human capital can become reality?

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Outlook & Contact

MATURE IP – http://mature-ip.euinvestigates the harvesting of bottom-up approaches to support the maturing of competency models

Andreas SchmidtDepartment Manager / Scientific Coordinator MATUREFZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Haid-und-Neu-Str. 10-14 Karlsruhe, GERMANY (http://fzi.de/ipe)andreas.schmidt@fzi.de, http://andreas.schmidt.name

Christine KunzmannKompetenzorientierte PersonalentwicklungAnkerstr. 47, 75203 Königsbach-Stein, GERMANY, http://kompetenzen-gestalten.decontact@christine-kunzmann.de

Simone BraunFZI Research Center for Information TechnologiesHaid-und-Neu-Str. 10-14 Karlsruhe, GERMANY (http://fzi.de/ipe)braun@fzi.de

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