Other competence-based approaches

Although much controversy about NVQs, they are not the only form of competence-based training provided. Boam and Sparrow (1992) describe different schemes. Cmpetence-based training has become the received wisdom on approaches to management training, all the lists we have seen have been difficult to use in practice, mainly due to an understandable attempt to be precise or over-inclusive.

Torrington, Waite and Weightman's (1992) composite model

Describe the work of personnel specialists in the health service could be applied to other groups of jobs. It is crude because the boundaries must be blurred: ambiguity is essential if we are to make sense.

Our analysis starts from this point

consider not whether a person is able to do a job, but what skills are required to do a job: not 'this is how recruitment is done', but these are the skills you personally need, now, in order to do recruitment excellently'.

This is the approach of competence analysis, distinguishing between

The basis of this model is an analysis of the jobs that need doing by personnel and HR managers. The following list encompasses the main areas of expertise that a large NHS personnel department could need to have. The composite is based on eight facets of the personnel operational role:

personnel manager as

  1. SELECTOR
  2. PAYMASTER
  3. NEGOTIATOR
  4. PERFORMANCE MONITOR
  5. WELFARE WORKER
  6. HUMAN RESOURCE PLANNER
  7. TRAINER
  8. COMMUNICATOR

Every mainstream personnel management job consists of one or more of these roles. Selector and Trainer are those most commonly found to comprise a complete job. Some combination of two or three is usual. All the roles are highly interdependent. Each of these eight is then broken down into a set of professional competencies. An illustration is the professional competencies required in one of the eight roles, shown in Table 22.3.

Table 22.3 shows that there are some areas of overlap, so that job analysis is a technique that is used in other areas as well as selection. Each of the eight areas has a similar list.

There is also a list of generic competencies which are more general competencies used in at least two, and sometimes more, of the professional roles. These are: manaying oneself, working in the oryanisation, getting thinys done and working with people.

The idea of the job composite model, therefore, is that each individual's job will be a composite of activities drawn from the professional list and from the shorter list of generic competencies. Job-specific individual training needs can then be derived by using our self-assessment questionnaire (Table 22.4), developed from these two lists of competencies.

There have been many criticisms of the type of analysis we are putting forward here, not least of which is the belief that a competence-based approach cannot take into account individual differences.

Users of competency-based assessment should be aware that it provides one relatively partial view of performance. Its strong emphasis on the need for scientific rigour tends to lead to a rather narrow perspective which, on its own, is barely capable of reflecting the rich and often paradoxical nature of human behaviour. (Jacobs 1989, p. 36)