ASSESS Capabilities & Gaps
Being able to assess individual capabilities accurately is an important step in improving as an AM practitioner. By completing a personal competency assessment, a person can begin to understand what knowledge, skills, and behaviours they need to develop to best perform their job and where their strengths already lie. Furthermore, when individual assessments are completed across an entire team, managers can begin to understand where competency strengths and gaps exist at a team, departmental, and/or organizational level.
But, for a competency assessment to tell you something about an individual’s strengths and gaps it must be comparative. Capabilities are relative to expectations of the responsibilities to be performed. This is why it is critical to first understand the role(s) an individual performs and the target proficiencies they need to meet to be successful.
Competency assessment can also be used for future planning, not just current needs. Communicating competency assessments together with future career goals to managers will help them understand in which direction an individual would like to progress their career. Managers can also use the outputs of competency assessments to plan for upcoming work, job succession, and long-term strategic changes in the organization. By having this understanding of future organizational and individual needs and competency gaps, as well as individual career aspirations, competency development priorities can be set collaboratively between managers and staff.
Using the AM Development Tool to Conduct a Competency Assessment
Tab 3 of the AM Development Tool can be used to conduct a competency assessment and compare it to the custom AM Role(s) you defined earlier in the process. You can then use Tab 4 to set priorities for closing competency gaps, based on personal, team, and organizational capability needs, both now and into the future.
It is important to review the AMCF Proficiency Scale before undertaking a competency assessment. The more accurately a person can determine the proficiency level that most closely represents their current knowledge, skills, and behavioural abilities the more accurate their competency assessment will be.
As discussed above, organizations should encourage staff to conduct self assessments in coordination with supervisor feedback. This will facilitate an open dialogue about potential development opportunities and career aspirations, while keeping development aligned with organizational needs. Remember, the initial assessment is a baseline. Ongoing evaluation over time will reveal growth in competency strengths and reduction of gaps. The Guidance and Instructions document that accompanies the AM Development Tool provides some suggestions on how to accomplish this as the tool gets filled out.
A competency assessment will also help with Step 4 of the organizational implementation process of the AMCF: Execution of the Program. Conducting a competency gap analysis is an important part of assessing and mapping the state of an organization’s competencies, which forms the baseline for setting ongoing implementation priorities and planning competency management activities.
