Skills, Competencies and Core Values: a tough nut to crack?

Skills and Competencies are foundational for Talent management. They tie into many key HR processes: from Recruiting to Development, Learning, Appraisals and Performance, Compensation, Career Development and Succession Planning to Reporting/Analytics and KPIs that HR needs to deliver, to name a few.

The topic is mostly “solved” for so called Blue-Collar or production workers. Decades old requirements exist in many countries. They need to be solved for legal, regulatory, compliance and liability reasons. E.g. if you have an employee working in a production plant, not fulfilling the relevant pre-requisites (training, ability, instruction, health-check …) and something goes wrong, you are likely liable as employer.

As this is a “solved topic” for most, vendors have little incentive to understand, to invest, to cover it, with new technology or approaches – they rather focus on another “white spot” – an uncovered – target group, where they hope to secure investment budget: white collar workers.

The problem to solve there? Skills and Competencies and related Job Architectures take a lot of time to develop and are difficult to maintain. Only few companies ever succeeded in doing this. Benefits like

a.?????Clear, transparent compensation structures

b.?????Well defined career paths

c.?????More options for Job Rotation

d.?????Better visibility of talent pools

e.?????Less risk for succession

do not seem to be important enough to go through the related efforts (both “cultural” and “technical”). Keeping white collar staff in existing roles/responsibilities, changing only when needed (driven 100% from a business perspective) and avoiding active HR management, seems to be the de-facto solution of choice.

With AI in the game and the promise of an “emerging” easy to maintain set of skills/competencies for white collar workers, is this likely to change? What do you think?

A related, interesting topic are “Core Values. Most of the time, they are “directions” or “goals”. E.g. if your company has core values around topics like “diversity”, “trust”, “customer first”, “teamwork” and “innovation”, you clearly know, what is NOT working in your company. Your culture is likely “NOT diverse” and probably, at least partially, sports a low trust environment. “Core values” are defined not because they define your company as it is, but because the wish of key stakeholders is to change the company culture into the defined direction. I remember doing the exercise many years back, around 2008 – our number one key value was “Customer first”. That was a fun and valuable exercise to do.