How Can I Create a Competency Metric to Clearly Define Job Roles and Responsibilities?

I am working as an HR Executive in an IT company and have 3 years of experience. I want to develop or design a competency metric for our company that provides a clear picture of each job role and its responsibilities. I want every employee's role and responsibilities to be documented and interlinked with the competency metric and skill set. Can anyone help me in designing this? It is very urgent for me.

Example:

1. Defining each role and its responsibilities (including HR, Directors, and all employees at different levels).
2. Defining their skills.
3. Mapping these with the competency metric.
4. Ensuring this metric is useful for hiring new resources.

Please let me know how to start and where to start in preparing this metric. I would be really grateful if anyone can help me out.

Steps to Develop a Competency Metric

Yes, you have to start with:

- JD
- Identify critical roles and critical people
- Skill sets. For this, you have to identify the technical team, i.e., in most cases, all the HODs.
- Identify the skills of the individuals versus the required skills.
- Do gap analysis.
- Plan the skill development plan.

The above process is useful for role and position clarity, recruitment, succession, career planning, etc. All the best.

Regards,
Kamesh

This is indeed a very lengthy process. You may have to sit with the business managers, understand the nature of the business, the nature of the job for different positions, and then you shall be able to design/draft the roles and responsibilities. Once you are done with the roles/responsibilities, you may have to link them with the competencies that are required to perform the role.

Later, you will be in a position to map the skills of the people with the competencies that you have identified for the roles and not the people. While preparing the skills matrix, you may have to sit with the individual/his supervisor to arrive at the right decisions in gauging his skills.

A skills matrix purely helps the organization to develop its individuals to get the best out of them. I hope this gives you a bit of insight to start working on it.

Thank you so much, Mizra. Actually, I started working on the Org chart in a hierarchical level. Based on the Org chart, I can have objectives for each level. Is this the right process to send an email to all the team leads and project managers to define their own and team members' roles and responsibilities? This way, I can have a draft copy of my employees' responsibilities and add more depth to those responsibilities.

Because I am the only HR in my company, I don't have a clear idea of the responsibilities of all SE/SSE/Team leads/Project managers.

Process to Define Roles and Responsibilities

Please find the following points as I am planning to start this process:

1. Preparing the Organizational chart and reporting structure.
2. Sending an email to Team leads and Project Manager to define their own and their team members' current responsibilities.
3. I will sit with my director and CEO and will add more responsibilities for the same if needed for each resource.
4. Sending an email to employees to mention their primary skills and secondary skills.
5. I will group these skills and responsibilities with the competencies.
6. Now I will have skills and responsibilities for each in my organization.

Let me know if this process helps me out or if I need to follow anything else.

Competency Matrix Design

Also, let me know what competencies I need to have to design the Competency matrix. Are Skills (responsibilities), Experience, and Qualification enough?

I am attaching the company's competency matrix, which was prepared by my ex-HR, but I feel it was copied from the internet. I want to prepare one like this that matches the organizational chart and skill matrix as well. It would be useful when hiring new employees to see if they match our competency matrix or not.

Let me know if I am wrong anywhere, as I am learning all these. As of my current knowledge, I just mentioned all these.

Please guide me, Mizra.

Thanks,

Soujanya

Let me compliment you at the outset for raising a query in clear terms with some information about the scenario and your role. Such information is missing from a number of posts. I am not sure if you have seen previous posts on this topic at CiteHR. For example, please visit https://www.citehr.com/30015-how-des...rix-sheet.html.

For an HR person, the way you have gone about it makes sense given the paucity of time and assistance you have. Have a nice day.

Regards,
Simhan
Learning and Teaching Fellow (Retd)
The University of Bolton, UK
Chief Advisor, Promentor-consulting

I'm glad that you have a very good understanding of this piece. I appreciate the efforts you are putting in to streamline the processes and systems. You are heading in the right direction, but when it comes to identifying competencies, you may encounter many for each individual role. Generally, competencies can be defined at the organizational level (which helps meet its objectives, mission, and vision statement) and then at the individual role level (which assists the individual in completing their tasks). This can be divided into two parts: Functional and Leadership based on the individual's role.

Overall, you can define competencies in three terms: Core, Functional, and Leadership. This way, you are assessing an individual not only on their functional capabilities but also linking those with the organization's goals, objectives, and mission.

Example:

Core Competencies - Result Orientation (required for every individual in the organization, with varying weightage for different positions based on the role and span of control)

Functional Competencies - Technical skills (measured based on technical skills and how effectively the individual maximizes their performance)

Leadership Competencies - Strategic decisions (essential for building competent leadership, assessed for those at manager level and above)

Once you finish defining role clarity, you should identify a set of competencies (maybe 20 or 30) that will meet your organization's needs and then start assessing them periodically (quarterly, half-yearly, annually - depending on the organization's requirements).

I hope these points will help you in completing your tasks.