Get to know yourself with the competency map

After a challenging year for everyone and the unfortunate daily postings on platforms such as LinkedIn of people losing their jobs as a result of covid and other restrictions, I have been inspired to prepare this article, which I believe and hope will help many of those impacted, the many who are now standing at the professional crossroads.

You start looking for a new job, you start to doubt yourself, your talent and competences. You can’t find the ideal job offering or you come up against companies who do not respond to your application. There might be many reasons behind this. It could be a badly prepared CV, a poorly organized recruitment process, a significant number of candidates applying to the same role meaning competition is high, or maybe you’re just applying for the wrong type of position.

How often have you ask the question – ‘what exactly is it you would like to do’? Moving forward, what are you qualified to do? Now it’s starting to get more complicated, right? The truth is, many people do not know where to start to figure this out.

Let’s start with a little knowledge systematizing. What the competencies are?

Competency is the set of demonstrable characteristics and skills that enable, and improve the efficiency or performance of a job. They are not permanent as they can be developed but without using them regularly they can be forgotten

Competencies we can split into hard and soft skills. Hard skills are: foreign languages knowledge, industry knowledge or specific IT tools. Soft skills is more character related, like team player, communicativeness, creativeness, etc.

Both hard and soft skillsets affect the efficiency of work and are undoubtedly a key asset for the employer.

We should also add innate skills. These are most often connected with our character traits and represent most of our soft skills pool. This group also includes predispositions to have some hard skills. Whereas, the acquired (learned) skills do not need to be presented 😊. As the name suggests, they appear in the process of learning and gaining experience.

Using the well-known theory of competency models, we are able to create a set of competencies most important from the organization’s point of view. We group these competences and then assign them to individual positions. Such a procedure indicates what behaviours and skills a candidate or employee should have in order to achieve the best work results.

Competency map by beclose to resource

On the basis of competency models you can create your own competency map, the list of your skills gained from experience that you can use at work. Below please find the manual how to prepare it – you’re welcome 😊.

STEP 1 – create a list of your professional experiences (positions) and list all the competences you use in each of them. Both acquired and developed during work. Competences can duplicate in different positions.

STEP 2 – Rank competencies from 10 to 1 to see which competencies you have at the highest level and which at the lowest. Consider if any of the skills require additional development to improve.

STEP 3 – Now that you have  a ranking of your competences, think about what professions use similar skillset and define a list of potential positions.

Et voilà! 😊 Of course, identifying positions only on the basis of competences can be a challenge, so I cordially invite all interested for consultation!

Personality colours according to the DISC model can also be helpful to define your future work. On this basis, it’s easier to check whether our personality is compatible with the required and desired soft skills. In other words, are we predisposed to do the job we dream of? If not, we know what we should work on.

Big thank you to my amazing peer Scott for his support and proofreading! 🙂