What is Competency Based Training

If you find it hard to tell the meaning of Competency Based Training (CBT), maybe you can try by saying that competency is about attitude, skills, and knowledge (ASK) required to perform a task or know about a subject. Thus, competency based training is about training on attitude, skills, and knowledge to do a job or activity according to a standard set. This may be about your training programme to make a cup of coffee, create a flyer, deal with an angry customer or lead a team.

Sometimes for some of us, a concept can be to abstract, such as the word called "competency". Perhaps, here is another way to explain that competency and competency based training is about training on attitude, skills, and knowledge to do a job or activity according to a standard set.

At the workplace, CBT is designed and developed around the competency standards that have been identified for a specific job. Therefore, employee development is directly tied to job performance in the aspects of ASK, which is competency linked to the position.

Put in another way, competency is a set of knowledge, skills, behaviour, attitudes and characteristics that distinguish one person from another.?Because of these differences, you will find that each employee is unique in a certain way, even though they are in the same job function. For example, five clerks working on the same software will show different skills levels.

As for the trainer or performance coach or even the leadership level, CBT ensures that competency is defined as the combination of observable and measurable ASK that enables upskilling and reskilling as well as performance coaching to take place. Just as important, competencies (ASK) are translated into learning outcomes in training programmes.

Within different scopes of training programmes, the broad concept of competency should be:

? related to realistic workplace practices (linked to standards)

? expressed as an outcome (performance results)

? easy to understand by trainers, supervisors and employees (can seen and measure).

The above concepts can expand to the example below:

The broad concept of competency related presentation skill would be:

? related to realistic workplace practices (linked to presentation standards such as informing the management team about the project's progress or persuading the team to adopt a new work process).

? expressed as an outcome (performance results such as explaining and interpreting the impact of data compiled in the project or outlining the benefits to gain after switching over to the new work process).

? easy to understand by trainers, supervisors and employees (can seen and measure such as the number of project update recommendations accepted by the management team or dipstick team survey on the user acceptance level during the implementation of the new work process).

Leading from the above example, a sample CBT would probably be about:

1) Presentation skills training programme focusing on information sharing and interpreting of data to update the management team with acceptable recommendations.

2) Change management skills training programme focusing on persuading others through highlighting the benefits in adopting a work process with a satisfactory result)

In conclusion, CBT enables trainers and/or performance coach as well as leader to better target the specific areas of ASK to increase the support to the respective employee in discharging his or her duties in the workplace.