Competency Mapping and the Balanced Scorecard

Two clerks in a public-sector bank branch have the same degree and the same years of service. One stays calm with an angry customer and spots posting errors early; the other does not. Qualifications cannot explain the gap. Competencies can.

Knowledge and skills are the easiest parts to train and to test. Attitudes and traits are harder to see and slower to change, so employers often select for them and train for the rest.

Three types. Competencies are sorted by how widely a job family needs them.

At a Pune auto-parts plant, as an illustration: every employee needs integrity and teamwork (core). Supervisors, planners and stores staff all need to read a budget (cross-functional). Only the tool-room staff need to programme a CNC machine (functional).

Don't confuse these "core competencies" with a firm's core competence. In strategy, a core competence (Prahalad and Hamel, 1990) is a collective strength of the whole firm that rivals find hard to copy. In this HR sense, "core" means the behaviours every employee needs. Some textbooks use a different split altogether: technical, behavioural and managerial competencies. Learn the scheme your own text uses, and know that the other exists.

Where it breaks. Generic words like "teamwork" or "integrity" appear on almost every firm's list. They help only once each is written as behaviour you can observe, such as "shares information with the next shift without being asked". Traits and attitudes can also be measured only through behaviour, which invites bias.

For exams. Know the four parts, the three types with two examples each, and the idea that a competency is something demonstrable. The next block shows how organisations identify and record competencies job by job.

Know, can do, outlook, trait: and three reaches, core, cross-functional, functional.

A firm wants to promote its best technician to supervisor, hire a new planner and train the stores team. Each decision needs the same answer: what does this job demand, in behaviour you can see? Mapping works that out once and reuses it.

Why organisations do it.

• Staff are costly, so a wrong hire or an early exit is expensive.
• People are an asset, and the right people can run technology, finance, markets and customer relationships well.
• Getting more from people beats getting more people: mapping shows who can be upskilled.
• Customers expect more, so service competencies must be built on purpose.

The four stages.

Back to the plant, as an illustration, for a stores supervisor. The purpose is to keep every line supplied. A critical success factor is no stock-outs. A key result area is stock accuracy, and one key activity is a weekly bin count. In stage 3 the analyst finds that the best supervisors check bin counts against the records every day, and average ones do so only before audits. "Attention to detail" ranks high. In stage 4 it is written as an indicator: reconciles bin counts with records daily and reports gaps the same day.

Don't confuse the four stages with the five-step programme. The stages build the map for a job. Study materials also give a five-step sequence for rolling a map out across an organisation:

1. Leaders agree the core competencies needed for the organisation's goals.
2. HR assesses what level of each competency each type of position needs, usually by interviewing sample jobholders.
3. Job descriptions are rewritten with the competencies, and the same competencies enter the appraisal form.
4. A competency matrix shows career paths as competencies grow in sophistication.
5. HR and each employee draw up an individual development plan: courses, workshops, mentoring.

Mapping also differs from job analysis. Job analysis records the tasks and duties of a job (see the Job analysis chapter). Mapping asks what behaviour separates strong performers in it. Job analysis is often an input to mapping.

Where it breaks. A map takes time to build and goes stale when jobs change. Copying what today's top performers do may also copy their bad habits, and may miss what the job will need next year. Interview data depends on how honestly and how well people describe their own work.

In practice. A finished map is reused four ways: to write selection criteria, to find training gaps, to appraise on the same criteria, and to choose people for promotion. That reuse is the point of mapping.

For exams. Expect the four stages in order, with what each involves, and the uses: recruitment, training, appraisal and promotion.

Design, collect, analyse, finalise.

A bank branch must choose one relationship manager from forty applicants, and a manufacturer must write competency sets for four thousand employees. The first needs a method that watches people act; the second needs one that reaches many people cheaply. No single method serves both, so mapping draws on five.

Assessment centre and critical incidents. An assessment "centre" is a method, not a building. The critical incident technique is credited to John Flanagan (1954) and also appears as a job analysis method.

Questionnaires. Several standard instruments are used. The Common Metric Questionnaire (CMQ) records work requirements and activities. The Position Analysis Questionnaire (PAQ) links job characteristics to human characteristics. The Occupational Analysis Inventory lists work elements across many occupations, and the Work Profiling System covers ability and personality attributes. Functional Job Analysis (FJA) is often listed here too, but it is a job analysis method developed by Sidney Fine, not a form. It rates what a worker does in relation to data, people and things.

Psychometric tests are of two kinds. An aptitude test shows natural inclination, such as for numbers or design, and predicts how well a person will learn with training. An achievement test shows what a person has already learned, such as in mathematics or language.

Don't confuse job analysis tools with competency methods. CMQ, PAQ and FJA come from job analysis. They describe work in a way that can be turned into required competencies, so mapping borrows them, but they do not assess a person. Likewise, aptitude means "can learn"; achievement means "has learned".

Where it breaks. Each method has a blind spot, so careful mapping combines two or three. An interview alone can favour the confident talker; a test alone cannot show how a person behaves in a team.

For exams. Expect to name the five methods and match each to its description, and to tell aptitude from achievement tests. When CMQ, PAQ or FJA appear, remember they belong to job analysis.

Go deeper for practitioners

A decision. You must map the competencies of customer-service agents in a firm with 3,000 of them, and select 12 team leaders from 60 internal candidates. Use a questionnaire and a few interviews for the first, because breadth matters and the stakes for each person are low. For the second, an assessment centre with a role-play and an in-basket is worth its cost: 12 promotions shape the team for years. A critical incident exercise run with the best and weakest agents can sharpen the first map cheaply.

Triangulation. When two methods agree, trust the finding more. When they disagree, treat that as a question: a candidate who tests well but performs poorly in simulation may know the theory without having the habit.

Centre, incidents, interviews, questionnaires, tests.

A plant reports a record profit, but its best technicians are leaving and deliveries are slipping. Profit reports the past, so it is the last number to show trouble. A manager who watches only money learns of the problem too late.

It is a framework for the whole organisation, not a tool for HR alone. Its balance is between financial and non-financial measures, and between results that have already happened and the drivers of future results. Unit 6 (Strategy implementation and evaluation) sets out the four perspectives and their questions. This block looks at where people measures sit in them.

Link to competency mapping. The competency map supplies the yardstick for learning and growth. Suppose the map says a stores supervisor needs "attention to detail" at a given level. The scorecard can track how many supervisors reach it. It can also test whether closing that gap improves stock accuracy, an internal process measure.

Don't confuse learning and growth with customer retention. Customer retention belongs to the Customer perspective. Learning and growth is about the organisation's own capability: employee skills and training, information systems, and culture. Study notes also sometimes call the scorecard a tool "for evaluating HRM" or list "Human Resource" as a fifth perspective. It is a general strategic framework, and the four perspectives are the whole list. Names vary slightly between books: Financial (or Finance), Customer, Internal Business Process (or Business Processes), Learning and Growth.

Where it breaks. People measures are the hardest to choose well. Training hours show effort, not skill gained. Engagement and retention move slowly and have many causes, so linking them to profit is a matter of judgement. As with any scorecard, staff may work to the measure and not to its purpose, and too many measures blur the focus.

For exams. Know Kaplan and Norton (1992), the four perspectives and a measure for each. Learning and growth covers people and capability; the chain of cause and effect runs from it up to financial results.

Go deeper for practitioners

Leading measures. Financial results lag. Skills, engagement and process quality move first. If key staff retention drops this quarter, profit per employee is unlikely to hold for long.

Employee outcomes. In their later book (1996), Kaplan and Norton treat employee satisfaction, retention and productivity as core outcome measures of learning and growth, driven by enablers such as staff competencies, technology and the climate for action.

The HR scorecard. Becker, Huselid and Ulrich (2001) adapted the idea to the HR function itself, so HR can show how its practices support the strategy. This is the HR-specific tool; the original scorecard is not.

A decision. A branch network raised training hours sharply, yet complaints did not fall. Ask whether the training addressed the competencies the map says matter for the complaint-prone roles. If not, the measure was counting hours, not capability.

Money, customers, processes, learning: people at the foundation.