Building a credible, capable and competent workforce – an enterprise-level approach. Part 2

Welcome to the second part of our blog on building a credible, competent and capable workforce. In part one, we looked at formalising job families and selecting the right competencies; in part two we will look at building a rating system that works for your teams, and running an assessment.

Establishing a competency rating

Once the selection of applicable competencies is complete, the next step is to define what ‘competent’ looks like for that job role in terms of both knowledge and experience. My preferred method for this is to review a completed ‘role profile’ with the level of management above it; for example, asking the senior PMs whether the role profile for the junior PM is accurate from their perspective.

Warning: knowledge may not be linear and senior people may not be practising to expert level. Instead, they will be leading and managing the experts and, ideally, your scoring will reflect this – giving credit for evaluating and optimising approaches alongside ‘expertise’ in a specific competence.

Continue this activity with a series of workshops until you have created and agreed a complete list of competencies that ‘apply’ to each job role.

One factor we must include at this point, which we touched on earlier, is complexity. This is an essential parameter for the measurement of competence, and accurately reflects a typical PM’s career path – becoming involved with progressively more complex and risky projects over time. The APM scoring system for whether or not a project is ‘complex’ is certainly good enough to start the debate within an organisation, against which an organisation can then map its own version of complexity, or from which a bespoke version is likely to be created.

The first part of this discussion is inevitably the ‘big equals complex’ argument. Well, to use a time-honoured phrase, ‘it ain’t necessarily so...’. For example, laying 100 metres of pipework under a road is unlikely to be considered complex, but does it follow that laying 100 kilometres of pipework, by virtue of being ‘big’, is automatically complex? To answer this question, we must consider other factors: where is the road? Which road are we talking about – the M25 or the B350? Is the road in continuous use? Who are the stakeholders, and do their views of success differ? What technology are we using? Are there likely to be challenging risks – archaeological, unex