Let's talk about workplace competencies. When we refer to workplace competencies, we're talking about a set of knowledge, skills, and experience a person needs to carry out a work process optimally.
These competencies can vary and are tied to business models, organizational culture, and the specific requirements of each work process. Understanding, classifying, and identifying them is essential when defining a job profile.
Along these lines, we find different types of competencies, including soft skills and hard skills.
Soft skills refer to abilities more closely tied to self-management, attitude, and emotional regulation. In other words, they're competencies that aren't based on specific technical or specialized knowledge needed to carry out a work process.
Soft skills are essential for an organization to function properly and for every person working at the company to be able to do their job well.
On the other hand, hard skills refer to abilities tied to specific knowledge, specialized skills, or techniques needed to perform a particular job.
These competencies usually require formal training, a specific academic background, or very concrete experience carrying out certain work processes.
Soft skills
In this article, we'll first focus on soft skills. Why? Because soft skills tend to be a common factor when hiring employees, and they're also the foundation of organizational success.
In other words, how much a company needs these soft skills tends to vary little between different organizations and work processes. That said, some soft skills are very specific to certain job roles or are valued more highly in particular work contexts.
When we talk about soft skills, we classify them into three categories: emotional competencies, self-management competencies, and organizational competencies.
These competencies originate from within the person — from their emotions to how they express themselves while doing their job and how they relate within an organizational environment.
- Emotional competencies
- These skills are related to emotional intelligence and the ability to recognize, understand, and manage one's own emotions and those of others. They include empathy, self-awareness, and the ability to handle emotional situations.
- Self-management competencies
- These competencies refer to the ability to manage one's own time, set goals, stay motivated, and adapt to change. They include self-discipline, resilience, and the ability to make effective decisions.
- Organizational competencies
- These skills are essential for functioning efficiently in a work environment. They include effective communication, teamwork, conflict-resolution ability, and adaptability to the organization's culture and dynamics.
Emotional competencies
When we talk about emotional competencies, we're referring to a person's psychology in the context of their job performance. These competencies are closely tied to the emotional intelligence a person has for navigating their work.
Although some jobs require specific emotional traits, we can identify a common denominator across all occupations. Some fundamental emotional competencies for any job include:
- Resilience
The ability to face challenges, adapt to change, and recover from difficult situations.
- Empathy
The ability to understand and connect with the emotions and perspectives of others.
- Self-awareness
A deep understanding of one's own emotions, strengths, and weaknesses.
In addition, self-regulation of emotions is crucial. This means avoiding excessive displays of emotion, such as anger, and maintaining an appropriate sense of risk in the workplace.
The ability to regulate our emotions is essential when facing difficult situations or dealing with challenging clients, but it's also key to reaching the state of well-being needed to be productive.
That said, as mentioned, some jobs will require certain emotional traits. For example, a soldier needs a certain tolerance for frustration or emotional control in difficult situations. More commonly, people who deal with difficult customers also need a degree of resilience, emotional control, and assertive communication.
Self-management competencies
Next, we have self-management competencies. These competencies show up most clearly when a person is carrying out their work process. Within self-management competencies, we find skills such as:
- Time management
This relates to how a person prioritizes their activities and plans their time to meet established goals within a given period. It's essential that activities be realistic within that timeframe.
- Results orientation
People need a tangible goal to work toward. Without a clear focus on results, work is unlikely to be effective. The company also plays an important role by setting clear objectives.
- Continuous improvement
This competency is related to emotional skills. It involves the ability to learn, self-observe, and self-correct in order to keep improving within the process. People who are progress-minded and seek to improve their processes tend to be more competitive in the job market and within the company.
Organizational competencies
Finally, let's talk about organizational competencies — those an employee needs to work effectively within their environment. These competencies are essential for the company to run smoothly and for team members to collaborate effectively.
- Adherence to organizational processes and structures
This means understanding and adhering to the policies, rules, and structures established within the organization. It requires logical thinking and the ability to navigate these structures.
- Effective communication
Communication is key for processes to run smoothly. When we communicate correctly, we make it easier for colleagues, teams, and other departments to collaborate. Good communication with suppliers and customers is also essential to the company's success.
- Service attitude
A service attitude means being willing to help others. People who isolate themselves can make it harder to solve problems and collaborate. Those willing to support their colleagues, on the other hand, contribute to the organization's overall well-being.
- Teamwork
A person shouldn't just know how to work as part of a team — they should also know how to navigate the work processes the company has already established. We've mentioned some competencies, but it's also crucial that the company define appropriate processes, rules, and policies so people know how to operate within them. Success in teamwork doesn't just depend on individual skills, but also on the consistency and clarity of organizational guidelines. When every team member understands and follows these guidelines, it creates an environment of effective collaboration.
While we've covered some examples of the three types of soft skills, it's worth emphasizing that there are many other classifications and competencies out there. How much importance and priority we assign to these competencies also depends on our organizational culture and business model.
That said, here we've presented what we consider fundamental for today's workforce. Remember that developing these competencies not only benefits the individual but also contributes to the success and efficiency of the organization as a whole.
Hard skills
Now, when we talk about hard skills, we enter territory that can be a bit more complex. While we can identify hard skills that are common — valid across different companies or job roles — they become more specialized depending on the specialty, the type of role, or the type of business in question.
Within these competencies, we find administrative competencies, operational competencies, leadership competencies, and specialized competencies. We could also talk about technological competencies.
Although the latter could be included in the classifications mentioned above, there are some elements exclusive to technology use that we should consider.
Administrative competencies
These refer to how people keep control of their work processes. They also include soft skills, like the ability to manage time or workloads, as we saw earlier.
But in a more formal sense, they can also involve hard skills — for example, keeping payroll organized, tracking employees' or our own clock-in and clock-out times, or balancing what we produce against what we spend, and so on.
These competencies require knowledge of accounting, management, efficiency, and effectiveness, which can become more complex the deeper you go into them.
Operational competencies
These are specific to each work process and vary widely between companies. They involve the knowledge and skill needed to use certain resources or tools to achieve a specific goal within a work process.
For example, knowing how to operate a press, repair software, or repair hardware could be considered operational competencies, although the last two are more closely related to technological competencies. An operational competency that affects all of us is risk management, as is producing a product or closing a sale.
Specialized competencies
Then we have specialized competencies, which vary depending on the field they belong to. Some business models have very specific work processes or specialized business models.
For example, we're referring to competencies that are unique to those work processes or business models, or that are rarely found elsewhere. Think of a nuclear physicist, a financial risk analyst on the stock exchange, or an operator of a laser cutting machine, for example.
Technological competencies
Technological competencies can also be classified into different levels, from basic technological competencies required of everyone — like using Excel, Word, or other software for writing or calculations — to using a phone to stay in touch.
However, this becomes more complex and starts to overlap with some specialized competencies. Even so, it's important to start identifying which technological competencies your company needs when hiring people or offering training.
Conclusion
Up to this point, we've provided a broad overview of how we classify competencies. We've respected the different classifications, focusing on the goal of understanding how competencies are categorized and how we should approach them. It's essential to have this clear before diving into building competency development plans.
Next comes understanding and knowing the level of mastery of these competencies within our company, which requires setting a standard and, above all, planning to assess that level of mastery within our organization.
In upcoming sections, we'll explore how to identify competencies within our company. This means determining which common competencies are needed across all of our employees, as well as the specific competencies for each area and role. We'll also assess the level of mastery of these competencies.
