List of Core Competencies in Employee Training

You’ve undoubtedly heard a lot of self-designated training experts go on and on about core competencies in recent times, and I bet you’re sick to death of seeing this term brought up. I don’t blame you one bit. However, this is actually important, and while I think a lot of talking heads on the internet go on about it a little too much without saying anything useful, there is useful information to be given out on this topic. So, we’re going to give you a list of core competencies. Before we do that, though, let me point out that there are several categories of core competencies overall, and there are entirely too many of them to fit into this list. As a result, this will be abridged a bit, covering only the most crucial ones, and explaining them as concisely as I can possibly make work. That said, this one will be mostly about leadership competencies. As I said, there are too many core competencies to list here by a huge amount, so this core competencies list will probably be one of many, many we will have to do. #1 – Leadership Establishing Focus: Aligning unit goals to the company’s mission, ensuring understanding of interrelation of all work to this goal, ensuring this understanding, and ensuring that the goals a unit develops work to the summary goals. Motivational Support: Recognizing and rewarding people for achievements, thanking people for their contributions, and finding ways to make the work rewarding. Teamwork Fostering: Recognizing the input and ideas of others, support their ideas and proposals, being open to the concerns of others, being constructive in expressing disagreements. Empowering Others: Allowing others the latitude to make decisions within their domains, ability to let others make decisions and take charge, encouraging individuals or groups to set goals, expressing confidence, encouraging groups to resolve problems themselves. Managing Change: Working cooperatively with others to produce solutions, taking the lead in setting new directions, seizing opportunities to influence directions, helping employees to understand the change and the need for it, implementing and supporting the changes at hand to reinforce their permanence by example. Developing Others: Delegating responsibility, providing helpful feedback, giving others assignments that help them to develop, meeting with employees regularly to discuss their developmental progress, recognizing and reinforcing their efforts to evolve and expressing confidence in their abilities to be successful. Managing Performance: Ensuring that employees have clear goals, working with them to set performance standards, supporting employees in their efforts, staying informed with progress, providing specific feedback, and dealing firmly with problems. Communication: This one’s obvious, but important, ensuring that goals are known to employees, and that concerns of employees reach stake holders as well. Interpersonal Awareness: Understanding the interests of others, noticing how they feel, anticipating reactions to situations, listening to the ideas and concerns of others, understanding their strengths and weaknesses, saying and doing things to address their concerns, finding non threatening ways to approach others about sensitive issues, and ensuring they feel comfortable with their relationships with their colleagues and with leadership. These are entirely leadership-based, but all employees, whether leaders or not, need to have leadership skills, because there comes a time when they have to fall back on their own strengths as a leader. It is inevitable, even if that’s not their normal responsibility. But, that’s all the room we have for this list of core competencies. We have yet to cover the myriad of ones not dealing with leadership, or any of them dealing with non-human elements yet. Stick around, because we will undoubtedly broach those in the near future. I’ll probably look at some other core competencies that fall under other categories in a follow-up post in the coming weeks.