Where Can I Put Competencies?
Where Can I Put Competencies?
If your organization is gearing up to introduce or revamp competencies, you’ve stumbled upon this article at the exact right time. There are no “right” and “wrong” ways to organize your competencies, per se, but there are certainly easier vs. harder ways when it comes to Workday. And it all has to do with which objects Workday lets us place competencies on.
The objects are:
In this post, we’ll start with a refresher on what competencies are and their capabilities as an object in Workday. Then we move into the exciting part; where we can place competencies and how we can use this knowledge to make our lives easier.
As a quick aside and shameless plug, we’ve discussed competencies here before specifically in comparison to skills (Skills vs. Competencies). Click on over if that peaks your interest.
What are Competencies?
A structured and controlled way for organizations to highlight and define behaviors that they care about and want to use to drive performance. The organization dictates what competencies, defined in what way, get assigned to what cohort of employees. Competencies frequently will get pulled into employee performance reviews and receive a rating assessment.
Now, if your organization uses the same set of competencies for the entire population, you catch a break! The assignment of these competencies is straight-forward, with the easiest being hardcoding them into your performance review.
However, if different employee populations are assessed on different sets of competencies, there are strategy options for how we deliver the right competencies to the right employees.
What Do We Stand to Gain?
Two things, transparency and efficiency. Let’s say we place clearly defined competencies on our job profiles or management levels. That information makes expectations for end-users that much clearer. I always prefer to know what I’m supposed to be doing before I’m supposed to be doing it. And efficiency. How we organize our competencies could be the difference between a single Year-End performance review template and ten.
Where Could I Put Competencies?
Navigate to task Edit Job Profile > Qualifications > Competencies to include Competencies directly on a job profile. You have the option to indicate if the competency is required or optional, and select a target rating. IF you have competencies placed on objects associated with this job profile, you will see those listed in the “Competencies from Other Sources” section.
Navigate to task Maintain Competencies for Job Family and select which Job Family. You will have the same options to indicate if a competency is required vs. optional and select a target rating.
This may begin to feel repetitive. BUT. Navigate to task Maintain Competencies for Management Level and select which Management Level. You guessed it! You can add your competencies and optionally indicate if it is required and pick a target rating.
If we can successfully organize our competencies based on Job Profile, Job Family, or Management Level, we can “pull from position” within our performance reviews. In this way, employees can receive the same performance review template that auto populates with different competencies (that are pulled from their position aka job profile, job family, or management level).
If we CANNOT do this, hardcoding competencies onto performance review templates is our fail-safe option. All we’d need to do is identify the right cohort for each unique competency set via template eligibility rules. The downside here is more review templates; we’ll need a unique template for each unique competency set.
As an added bonus, if you include the Competencies tab somewhere within the Worker Profile, employees can see their delivered competencies and any applicable target / assessed ratings.
As we wrap up, it’s worth noting that your organization does not have to use competencies at all – plenty of folks don’t. But if you do, and it’s possible to organize competencies along the lines of Job Profiles, Job Families, or Management Levels, it does make ongoing maintenance easier within Workday.