Quality Criteria for Competency Assignments: Examples from a Project Management Case Study

We present several quality criteria for skills management initiatives based on the competence-performance approach [Kor97]. The criteria help to measure reliability and validity of a skills management approach and thereby help to determine the suitability of competency assignments in an organisation. The approach is illustrated by a case study. 1 The need for Quality Criteria in Skills Management Whenever databases are being used in skills management initiatives, they usually contain assignments of competencies to people or competencies to jobs. These assignments are established through employee profiles which provide information on the competencies possessed by a certain employee, or job profiles which detail out the competency requirements of a certain job. The question arises whether these assignments reflect the “true affairs” in the organisation – a precondition for the usefulness of such assignments. In this paper, we define competencies as personal characteristics (knowledge, skills, abilities) of employees which are relatively stable across different situations (see also [LA03a]). Competencies can be described in terms of distinguishable elements of underlying capacities or potentials which allow job incumbents to act competently in certain situations [Ber00]. Employees dynamically combine these elements according to the requirements of the situation in a self-organising process [EH99]. From a psychological perspective, competencies constitute theoretical constructs which can not be directly assessed or observed. Instead, they have to be inferred from some form of observable performance. For example, whether a project manager has the ability to communicate effectively with clients, whether she is proficient in project planning, or whether she is an expert in eLearning Systems, can not be directly observed. One would have to observe her performance in several situations (or ask someone who has done so), in order to arrive at an assessment of these competencies for that particular person.