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Book Summary/Review:
Competency-Based Performance Improvement
This article is based on the following book:
Competency-Based Performance Improvement
"A Strategy for Organizational Change"
by David D. Dubois, Ph.D
Printed with permission from: 
Introduction
Human Resource Development (HRD) is an organized set of learning experiences provided
by an employer within a specified period of time to bring about the possibility of performance improvement and/or personal growth. Within HRD there are three
activity areas: training, education and development. Dubois emphasizes training and education activities from the viewpoint of competency-based processes and procedures.
Dubois uses following core definitions through his book:
• job competence, is an employee’s capacity to meet (or exceed) a job’s requirements by producing the job outputs at an expected level of quality within the
constraints of the organization’s internal and external environment.
• job competency, is an underlying characteristic of an employee (i.e., motive, trait, skill, aspects of one’s self-image, social role, or a body of knowledge).
• competency model, includes those competencies that are required for satisfactory or exemplary job performance.
• job competency menu, lists all the competencies that are important.
• curriculum, a system of perfomance improvement opportunities.
• competency-based curriculum, content specifications are defined in competence terms, consistent with the definitions above.
HRD often faces following common problems:
• HRD is not allways perceived as being linked to developing the employee competencies most needed
to help an organization meet its strategic business or organization goals and objectives.
• HRD does not consistently receive the level of senior management visibility, endorsement, and support
which is required in order for it to have optimal impact on improving employees job competence and,
subsequently, their job performance.
• HRD curricula (if one exists) and the instructional programs or learning opportunities that result
from them often lack conceptual and cohesive integration. They are oftentimes not developed in a
systematic manner.
• HRD does not consistently and explicitly acknowledge, include, and integrate a "total corporate" of
strategic organization perspective into its curricula, learning activities and instructional implementation processes.
• Curriculum planning – if it is done at all – is often hampered by not having a set of guiding principles
for the design, delivery, evaluation, and management of an organization’s performance improvement programs.
• HRD curricula and the instruction which results from them frequently focus on only the knowledge or skills
that employees require to complete job tasks and activities. Job competence is a complex phenomenon and that
kind of focusing often leads to competency gaps of employees.
• Classroom experiences are frequently too heavily invested in "learning about" the job and don’t provide to
employee experiences in thinking, feeling, and acting competently through their acquisition of global job competence.
Dubois states that the objective of the HRD systems described in his book is to achieve competent employee performance
that contributes to meeting an organization’s strategic goals and objectives in effective and efficient ways.
Systems Principles for HRD Practice
A signifant trend in HRD has been the application of systems principles to solving problems in the practise of HRD.
There is several definitions and explanations of systems and their attributes. Patricia McLagan defined a system as a
collection of independent, organized parts that work together in an environment to achieve the purpose of whole. William
Rothwell and H.C. Kazanas explained that a system is a mechanism which accepts a set of raw materials (e.g., people,
capital information, ingredients), applies activities to those materials in order to increase their value, and results
in one or more outputs (e.g., services, finished goods, products) that are released to environment.
Systems are dependant upon their external environment for both their inputs and reception of their outputs. There is
a flow pattern for the inputs and outputs. Most systems include subsystems, which interact with environmental suprasystems
– which are systems within a system.
The Strategic Systems Model
There has been a slow but steady movement to implement integrated, continuous-progress, and competency-based performance
improvement systems in organizations. To date, relatively few organizations have totally invested their energies at this level.
Many HRD practitioners do not have a technical competencies that are needed to create, implement and maintain competency-based training and education systems.
Organizations are facing declining HRD budgets and constant or increasing requirements for performance improvement programs
targeted at helping employees achieve strategic organization objectives. The application of the Strategic Systems Model (see
following figure) is one way an organization can improve on both the efficiency and effectiveness of its expenditures for
performance improvement. Application of the Stratetic Systems Model gently forces organization players who have a stake in its
performance improvement systems to acknowledge, confront, and attempt to resolve the issues or factors that impact the design
and delivery of job performance improvement learning opportunities.
A five-step Strategic Systems Model for creating and maintaining competency-based employee performance systems in an organization context is presented in the following figure.
Figure 1. Strategic Systems Model for Competency-Based Performance Improvement in Organizations.
Step 1: Front-end Analysis, Assessment, and Planning
In this first step of the application of the Strategic Systems Model, an organization is confronted by a problem or some
needs-oriented situation. This need could have been a reactive approach to a situation or a set of circumstances either external
or internal to the organization, or it might represent a proactive initiative that is motivated by a predicted or anticipated
situation. In practise, however, an organization's many performance improvement needs to be identified in a reactive way, rather
than from a proactive posture.
Numerous questions are usually asked and answered at this stage of the application of the Strategic Systems Model. A fairly typical sample includes the following:
• How critical is the perceived need (or needs) to the organization's strategic success?
• What level of investment in performance improvement interventions is warranted in order to achieve the desired job outputs or results?
• Will the ultimate return on the cost of a competency-based performance improvement process be sufficient to warrant the required investment?
• Are there alternatives to HRD-sponsored performance improvement opportunities which could be recommended in order to meet the perceived need(s) or to correct the identified problems?
There will allways be a two-way information exchange between the planning partners and and the organization's strategic goals and objectives (see Figure 1). The needs
are reviewed, and a broad-based plan is developed to determine how meeting those needs will contribute to the achievement of the organization's strategic management
goals. The work completed at this step of the Strategic Systems Model is a macro-level needs analysis. The knowledge, skills, and other underlying characteristics
(i.e., competencies) that employees need for successful job performance are not identified in detail at this time.
A plan for creating and implementing competency-based training or education opportunities
that will address "real" needs is created and agreed to by the planning partners. The client or client group is briefed and appropriate revisions are made.
Following any revisions and endorsement, action is taken to implement the plan. In most cases, this will mean researching the job competency requirements for
the performance needs which HRD solutions have been identified as an appropriate performance improvement alternative.
The analysis, Assessment, and planning results provide the boundaries and a firm foundation for generating the remaining components of the Stratetic Systems Model.
Step 2: Competency Model Development
The second step of the Strategic Systems Model is to plan and conduct the research needed to identify the job competence requirements and to construct one (or more)
competency models for the target population. At this stage, the competencies employees need to successfully achieve the job results are researched and documented. The
results of this step must be consistent with the terms of the front-end plan which resulted from the step 1.
A detailed and comprehensive micro-level Assessment of the competency needs of the target population can be conducted by using the components of a competency model.
These data and their analyses then become the foundation for curriculum planning and the design of performance improvement programs and interventions.
Regardless of the research and design approach that is selected, the resulting competency model must be endorsed by the client (or client group) and senior management.
The front-end plans and the results of the competency model research effort become the system inputs to the curriculum planning stage of the Strategic Systems Model.
Step 3: Curriculum Planning
In this step, the job competency requirements and the macro- and micro-level needs analyses are compined and translated into a curriculum plan. A curriculum consists of
a system of performance improvement opportunities, the content specifications for them, and a conceptual framework for linking the opportunities in a sequential manner that
will provide efficient and effective learning opportunities for employees.
A curriculum plan can be designed and planned for a single job, for a related class or category of jobs, or for an entire HRD program, encompassing numerous jobs or work
roles. If numerous jobs, organization units, or a wide span of control is represented by the competencies, then a sizable system of performance improvement opportunities could
result. Consistent with the definition of a curriculum, the performance improvement opportunities must be outlined in relation to the competencies associated with each of them,
a conceptual framework must link them, and a sequence for presenting them must be clearly specified.
The types of performance improvement opportunities that will be used to implement the training or education at the next stage of the Stratetic Systems Model are included
in the curriculum plan. The types of opportunities that are to be made available to employees have resource implications for the HRD department, the client, or the client
group, depending of the source(s) of funding for the project. HRD department must have considerable resources available to them if they intend to design and develop certain
types of learning opportunities, such as those that use electronic technologies.
Shortly, curriculum planning organizes performance improvement opportunities and learning activities into logical, meaningful segments that help employees develop their
competencies in ways that support the achievement of organization goals in the most cost-effective manner.
Step 4: Learning Intervention Design and Development
In this step, the competencies and the elements of the curriculum plan are translated into specific, detailed competency-based performance improvement interventions.
The learning or instructional designs that result from this stage of the work should heavily rely upon the use of learner-centered, rather than teach-centered, activities;
these are activities that require active participation by employees. In a learner-centered environment, employees are responsible for the learning that takes place. The employee
is an actively engaged student of the learning process rarther than passive observer of it.
Learning interventions should always be pilot tested before full implementation. The use of pilot test process is recommended to ensure that the content addresses the competency
requirements and the needs of the learners, and that appropriate learning and implementation strategies have been used used for intervention.
Step 5: Evaluation
In this step, you will create, implement, and use the findings of one or more evaluation subsystems to monitor the responsiveness of the performance improvement system to
employees' job performance needs and the strategic needs of the organization. All elements of the performance improvement system are likely canditates for evaluation.
Two levels of planning and development are required at the evaluation stage of the Strategic Systems Model. First, it is necessary to create a broad-scope evaluation plan.Once
the conceptual plan is completed, evaluation projects are designed and completed in accordance with the details of the plan.
A wide variety of potential Assessment outcomes is possible, depending upon how the evaluation subsystem is designed and implemented. The strengths of, and the needs for,
improvement in the practices under investigation should result from an analysis of the information that is collected.
Finally, it is essential to feed back the findings from the the evaluation subsystem(s) to all of the other subsystems included in the Strategic Systems Model (see Figure 1).
If an evaluation subsystem is comprehensively and carefully designed, it will be capable of revealing numerous changes associated with the organization systems and the performance
improvement systems that were created to support the organization systems. These could include, for example, changes in the competency requirements for a job, an instructional
intervention that is not effective, shifts in strategic emphases of the organization since the intervention was researched or designed, and so forth.
Tracking, analyzing, and evaluating the reasons for, and the impacts of , a shift in system performance can be very difficult and laborious work in the absence of systematically
planned and obtained evaluation results. This is especially true for training or education Systems in very large and/or geographically diverse organizaions, or where decentralized
delivery of the system intervention(s) is required. The breadth and depth of the evaluation subsystem will oftentimes be determined by the resources that the organization makes
available to HRD for evaluation, as well as by the organization's degree of interest and commitment to evaluation as strategy for constant and continuous improvement.
Improved Efficiency and Effectiveness
Overall gains in the efficiency and effectiveness of an organizaion's performance improvements can be realized through the application of the Strategic Systems Model. Specifically:
• A rationale underlying the Strategic Systems Model is that all employee training or education that is sponsored by an organization is committed to improving employees' job
performance in ways that will help the organization achieve its strategic objectives.
• The performance improvement interventions are research-based and emphasize the job competencies that exemplary performers use for succesfull job performance. The underlying high
pay-off attributes of employees are identified and performance improvement is focused on helping employees acquire those attributes, Consequently, time is not wasted having
employees develop attributes that do not contribute to exemplary performance.
• Competency-based training or education systems of the type Dubois has described are "self-marketing" because the key stakeholders and clients are involved at every stage of
development. This enhances the transfer of learning potential between the HRD fucntion and employees' managers.
• The definitions of the job competency models or menus are an outgrowth of the organization culture, norms, standards, and expectations. This improves the probability of their acceptance within the organization.
• The Stratetic Systems Model can be applied in a flexible manner so that a variety of organization needs can be addressed and met.
• It ensures the creation of learning experiences that ar highly specific to employees' job performance requirements and that are available at the time when they are most
critically needed; thus, the probability of training transfer is improved.
• The approach supports application and use of a wide variety of learning strategies, techniques, materials, media, and technologies.
• The approach is especially useful for creating training or education systems for developing employees' "soft" competencies – which are typical of jobs with a high
percentage of affective performance requirements.
• The approach fully supports the use of a wide variety of evaluation procedures and practices.
• The approach can be used to create training or education systems in organizations of any size or breadth.
(c) Copyright Jyrki J.J. Kasvi
www.knowledge.hut.fi/projects/itss/itssref.html
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