It is said that one's past actions is a good indicator of one's future behaviour. This saying holds ground in assessing employees in an organization. It is critical to know for an organization the skills its employees possess. As a part of the competency profiling, a large organization assesses the key competencies of its employees and organizes the data into the management information systems.

Competency profiling is normally done in the following steps:

a) Competency modelling
b) Competency assessment
c) Data collection and analysis
d) Gap analysis and Position

The discussion on competency modelling is beyond the scope of this article. The competency assessment is done based on the behavioural indicators of the employee. Each role is associated with a set of competencies and associated threshold levels. The employees are assessed on their competency for the role that they perform. Once the competency assessment data is available in the company’s management information systems, various sorts of reports can be pulled out to understand the organization’s skills on the whole.

One of the main parts of competency profiling is the collection of data gathered and analysis. This helps the organization in a focussed recruitment of people with the skills as required by the organization. It is widely believed that Google tries to recruit people only whose competencies are better than the average competency of the company. Such a policy could not be enforced without a comprehensive assessment and data collection and analysis procedures.

In the Indian scenario, for the IT enabled Services organizations such as typical business process outsourcing (BPO) companies, such a profiling can be used to their advantage. A competency profiling of its employees can quickly tell the management for instance, whether the majority of its work force is plagued by poor oral communication skills while the written communication skills are fine. Thus as the next step to data collection and assessment, the organizations do a gap analysis to find out whether the organization needs to be enthused with fresh talent or if an intense training in a particular area would increase the effectiveness of the workforce.

With data on the finger tips, the human resources staff and the executive management can decide how to position the organization both from a tactical point of view and strategic. For example, if language accent or oral communication skills are weak in a BPO organization, they can take a short term tactical view of pitching for non-voice work. While from a strategic point of view, the organization knows exactly where to focus to enable them to grow.

Gap analysis and positioning is typically done through series of brainstorming sessions where the different functions are involved. The key in this phase of competency profiling is to understand the organization’s capability in no unambiguous way. Competency profiling provides an organization the ability to position itself and take course corrections if the results tend southwards. A successful organization conducts competency profiling in regular intervals and would ideally have the skills to cross-section at their finger tips.