The Vision: A Unified, Scalable Framework
In many large organizations, competencies exist, but rarely in a way that truly drives impact. They sit in Excel sheets, vary across businesses, and are often treated as static reference documents rather than living systems that shape talent, learning, and growth. That was the starting point of our journey.
We set out to build a single competency framework that could:
Work across multiple businesses and functions
Scale to thousands of roles and employees
Integrate seamlessly with learning, talent reviews, and succession planning
Eventually support hiring and internal mobility
Designing the Framework: A Key Structural Decision
One of the most critical decisions we made early on was how to structure the framework. After extensive research and stakeholder discussions, we anchored:
Behavioral competencies to job levels
Functional competencies to job roles
My Role
I program managed this initiative centrally, coordinating across businesses, covering 600+ roles and 16,000+ employees. This involved aligning diverse stakeholder groups, standardizing fragmented inputs, and ensuring consistent execution across varying levels of maturity and readiness.
With that being said, given the scale of the organization, the model was intentionally federated, with business specific HR teams and functional leaders owning contextualization and deployment, while we ensured central program governance, standardization, and alignment to the overarching framework.
Understanding Competencies: The Building Blocks of Capability
At its core, a competency is a clearly defined combination of knowledge, skills, behaviors, and attributes that enable an individual to perform effectively in a role.
Competency Catalogues: A competency catalogue is a centralized repository of all competencies used within an organization.
Each competency in a catalogue typically includes:
A name (e.g., “Employee Relations”)
A definition (what the competency means)
Behavioral indicators (observable actions that demonstrate the competency)
Associated proficiency levels (how the competency evolves with mastery)
Competency Profiles: often referred to as a Job Competency Profile, defines the set of competencies and required proficiency levels for a specific role or job family.
It answers a simple but powerful question:
"What does success look like in this role?"
Enabling the System: From Framework to Platform
A competency framework creates value only when it is embedded into systems and workflows. In parallel with design, I worked on the platform enablement, which included:
Drafting detailed business requirement documents (BRDs)
Configuring assessment flows for employees and managers
Designing dashboards to make insights actionable
Linking assessment outputs to targeted learning interventions through IDPs
Integrating competency data into the succession planning module
We also ran multiple cycles of testing, demo sessions, and leadership reviews to ensure the system was intuitive, credible, and ready for enterprise adoption.
The Impact: From Framework to Action
We launched the behavioral competency framework enterprise-wide last year. The response was strong:
Over 90% of employees completed self-assessments
75% of managers completed evaluations
Competency insights are now a structured input into talent reviews and succession planning
Competency gaps flowing into targetted learning interventions
