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Building Competency Models for Top Performance
About Competency Modeling
Competencies are the knowledge, skills and attributes that make the difference between average and outstanding. For more than 30 years, Cambria has conducted competency modeling and assessments to help organizations identify the success factors that differentiate exceptional performance – especially for employees in challenging, complex, and high-value roles.
Cambria’s Approach
We help identify critical competencies in the context of the organization’s business strategy, challenges, values, and culture. We study an organization’s best performers, draw on decades of our own empirical research into the competencies that make the biggest difference, and project the organization’s future competency requirements.
This approach is more rigorous than using competency dictionaries, especially in roles where the difference between high performers and others is even more significant.
Our Results
Cambria’s competency models guide hiring, assessment, succession planning, and employee development by defining the essential differences between superior and average performance in pivotal roles.
They also provide a common language to talk about individual performance in the context of the business strategy and strategic advantages in the marketplace. When expressed as observable behaviors, they are readily applied to selection and development.
Addressing Your Key Challenges
Cambria develops leadership and job competency models based on robust research, using our proprietary behavioral interview methodology, and other data-gathering techniques that uncover the deeper motives, traits, skills, and behaviors necessary for superior performance in a job or role. Our expertise helps organizations address three fundamental challenges, which we explore below.
How Cambria Helps
Define Critical Capabilities
In every organization, a unique set of proficiencies and capabilities distinguish “outstanding” from “average” performance, especially in mission-critical roles. Cambria identifies those capabilities to provide a more precise definition of requirements for any job, including management competencies and competencies for other high-value roles.
Hire vs. Develop
It’s essential to distinguish between the critical few competencies that are required for hiring from competencies that can be developed on the job or learned in other ways. Personal characteristics such as initiative, teamwork, persistence, problem solving, judgment, and motivation fall into the former category.
Cambria can identify the critical “must hire for” competencies, how to assess them in job candidates, and provide advice on other competencies that can be learned.
Competency Benchmarks
Cambria has an extensive database of benchmark competency models for hundreds of key contributor, managerial, and executive roles in private sector, public sector, and notfor-profit organizations. These models provide a reference for competency modeling of specific and unique roles of special interest to our clients.
However, we often find that the best benchmarks are the high performers inside your own organization. Cambria helps you find them, distill what makes them successful, and integrate this knowledge into your hiring and development initiatives.