Competency Design at Scale

Client Overview

A mechanical services contractor delivering construction, plumbing, and service and maintenance work across commercial, industrial and healthcare projects. The workforce spans field trades, project delivery, engineering and corporate functions.

The Challenge

Trades and project-based businesses are badly served by generic competency content. The technical work is specific, the language is specific, and a framework that fails on either is ignored by the people it describes.

The organisation needed a competency framework covering its whole workforce, from field trades through to corporate. The only source material available was its job descriptions. At the scale required, the real risk was volume degrading quality: hundreds of competencies written quickly, drifting into task lists and repetition.

The Solution

Ben derived the framework directly from the client's job descriptions, holding the same standard across every competency regardless of how many were required.

The work involved:

• Deriving technical competencies role by role, retaining the technical language the trades actually use.
• Organising them into 118 competency domains reflecting genuine areas of technical expertise.
• Defining a core competency domain covering expectations common to everyone in the business.
• Checking each new competency against the existing framework to prevent duplication as the library grew.
• Raising gaps where a job description was too vague to ground a competency, rather than filling them with assumptions.

The finished framework contains 428 competencies across 118 domains.

Results

• Delivered 428 competencies across 118 domains covering the entire organisation.
• Maintained a single consistent writing standard across the full library.
• Gave the business a reusable structure it can extend as new roles are created.