Going Online With a Competency Management System Case Study

Paper, Partnership and Pilot

We have worked with this client, an international drilling contractor, since 2015 helping them to design and implement a paper-based competency management system.

Then in 2018, we worked with them to design and implement leadership and management competencies within their competency management system.  Finally, we did a small pilot online on our online system Progress.

The focus of the leadership project was on risk management with the aim of demonstrating cultural leadership competencies around the Safety Case. 

We started by articulating in the first draft what cultural competence means for Level 1, 2 and 3 leadership roles within the business. From this point, we were able to design a framework around this with 14 competencies in total.  

Through the initial pilot, we established that some of the job holders were struggling to relate to the competencies and what this meant to them in their own jobs. We were able to clarify this in the pilot and address it before rolling out the whole project.  

Taking the competency management system online onto Progress was reasonably straightforward.  The flexibility of Progress meant that we did not have to change the client’s competency management system. We could map the competency framework and records across into Progress, as well as linking online leadership courses. Key lessons from this project were:

Key lessons from this project were:

• Build your competency management system on paper first
• Be careful to get the standards right that you build the competency management system around
• Test and make sure that the users are familiar with what is required and what you are building into your competency management system
• Moving online, give the users face to face support, provide training and have help available if it is needed
• Make sure and verify the assessments early on in the process so that you can quickly spot and address any problems