| Background
The Competency system started life as a Health & Safety initiative in the off-shore drilling industry. To ensure compliance with an ISO-14000 Environmental Protection Audit, a QA Manager thought that it would be very useful to have a self assessment tool which would help people to understand their level of competency in a range of different skills. From the initial objective of ensuring that drilling engineers had the right skills to perform their job safely, the system has grown and expanded to the point where it is now used globally across the organisation in a variety of business areas with an inevitably diverse range of skills and roles. The Solution
Addept were chosen to develop the initial system after the company were told that it could not be done using their establish HR applications in the time available. The system started life with 4 levels of competency for each skill. Users could define groups of skills for which they could then carry out a self assessment. Having completed an assessment, it could then be securely stored in the system for comparison with new assessments at a later date. All the functionality for both users and administrators is delivered through a browser interface, enabling employees to access the system from anywhere in the world. Administrative users can create and update the skill definitions and competency levels without any technical assistance. Integration with Addept Connect has enabled seamless authentication of users accessing the system, ensuring the privacy of data and enabling only authorised users to update skill definitions and groupings. Ongoing enhancement
Over the years the system’s functionality has grown in-line with the number and diversity of people using the system. One of the first additions was the ability to create and store personal development plans. This was followed by adding 180° reviews by the person’s line manager. Then full 360° reviews were added enabling the person’s peers, subordinates and even customers to contribute to the review. An employee selects the people to be involved in the 360° review. These people are then sent an email asking them to review the person’s performance against range of different skills. The employee then receives an aggregated score for how he is performing. The individual scoring by peers, subordinates and customers remains confidential. Up to this point skill sets had been selected by the individual users to match the disciplines in which they were working. As the system was adopted by more and more parts of the organisation outside its initial technical engineering origins, the concept of job roles was added.
Job roles are defined in terms of a number of different skills and the skill level required by the job. This makes it far easier for an individual to assess their competency in a particular job. The system can be used to monitor performance within a role or to gain a measure of suitability for a proposed role.
Recently there has been a general trend throughout the organisation for the various learning and development programmes to be more focussed on the competencies required for the job. As such the system can now guide users to specific training courses and learning aids based on a gap analysis of their skills and the competencies required.
The creation of job roles has lead to a reconciliation of the skill profiles around the world and a gradual honing of the skill definitions. This has made the whole process far more consistent from country to country and also far more rigorous.
A Global System
The inherent scalability of the original design has been proven over the years as it has moved from a point solution to a global system. At the start, the system was designed for use by just a few hundred users but the user population has now grown to over 40,000.
As the information base captured by the system has grown, so has the value of the information it contains. The demand for reports based on this information has also grown. Rather than using a back end server based reporting package, which would limit the availability of reports, Addept developed a web based reporting interface, which enables authorised users anywhere in the world to run and see the reports they need from their desktop. In recognition of the global use of the system, recent developments have added a multi-language capability. Unlike many websites where different language support is achieved by cloning and then translating the site as a whole, the dynamic nature of the information that the site contains means this is not a practical solution. Instead users can define their normal business language and where available information will be displayed in that language or dialect, however where a particular item is not available in the chosen language the system will automatically resort to displaying the information in a fallback language. This means that pages which are dynamically created may be displayed in a mixture of languages according to the level of translation achieved, and that this mixture will be the best fit to the users own language skills. To date, support for English and Spanish have been established, with German and Cantonese currently under development. From its humble beginnings the benefits of the Competency system are now recognised around the globe. It provides a far more rigorous approach to defining both the competencies required to carry out a particular job and the self assessment of employees own skills in fulfilling their roles. | 
