"What would happen if a whole branch of our organization got sick or was shut down?"

"How would we react to cover the vacant roles?"

"Which employees would we turn to and how would we know if they had the skills necessary to cover effectively?"

These are critical questions that should be addressed when undergoing a pandemic or disaster planning initiative.

Visit http://www.avilar.com/solutions/disaster_prep.html to see how Avilar's WebMentor Skills, web-based competency management system can help answer these questions. The reports shown offer a glimpse of how organizations can use WebMentor Skills to identify the critical skills that have been, identify the employees who have the highest skill match for the open positions, and how to develop those employees' most critical skill gaps to minimize customer impact.

See how WebMentor Skills helps solve these critical workforce planning challenges:

Focus On: Pandemic & Disaster Planning / Planning for an Unexpected Loss of Talent & Skill

Focus On: Succession Planning / Planning for a Retiring Workforce

Future installments will include:

Focus On: Optimizing Your Training
Focus On: Identifying the Next Generation of Leaders
Focus On: Aligning Training with Corporate Goals

I've read a great deal about competency management, and believe that it's the right place to start to develop an integrated talent management program.  However, my organization is very small - we have only about 300 employees - and I'm the only HR professional in the organization.  My time is full of the traditional transactional HR stuff, but I'd love to get into competency management.  Any ideas?
 
Sincerely,

Looking to grow as a professional

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Dear Looking to grow,

We agree that a competency-based approach is the right approach to talent management, and we have worked with many organizations your size to implement successful programs.  However, the right reason for such an undertaking is one that is aligned with your organization's strategy, not just your professional development goals. 
 
When resources are limited, it's important not to bite off to large a project.  Think about focusing on something big enough to make a difference but small enough to do within a reasonable time with the resources you have. 

Here are several things small organizations should consider when embarking on a competency program.
 
1.  What skills will be most critical to achieve your strategy? 
If you've been experiencing rapid growth, you may be finding that relationship and process skills such as collaboration and process improvement are becoming more important than when you were even smaller.  Your leaders and employees may need to learn new ways of relating to each other and the work at hand; creating a competency model that reflects those new skills might be a good place to start to clarify the new expectations.
 
2.  What roles will be most critical to achieve your strategy? 
We think it's often a mistake to roll out a program to the entire organization at once.  If growth into new markets will be essential for your success, maybe the marketing and sales departments would be a good starting place.  If your customers are demanding a higher level of service than you can provide, maybe it's the supply chain.
 
3.  Make sure your top leadership has bought in. 
If you have to really sell the program to your leadership, you may have an uphill battle.  However, if you know what's important to your president or CEO, you should be able to make a good business case for how competency management will help impact his or her key areas of interest. 
 
Starting small makes sense - especially in small organizations.  Keep focused on organizational impact, be ready to demonstrate and report real impact, and you'll be off to a successful start.
 
Good luck & best wishes,

Chris Hipple
Director of Workforce Development Solutions


Have a question you'd like answered?
Email Chris or Direct Message @CompetencyMgmt on Twitter with the hashtag #CM (for Competency Management)

Great Books!