Levelled Competencies for a Manufacturing Workforce

Client Overview

An advanced manufacturing business supplying engineered components to demanding, highly regulated industries, with a workforce spanning production, engineering, quality and corporate functions.

The Challenge

The organisation needed a competency framework that could carry real weight in development planning, which meant the proficiency levels had to describe genuine progression.

Most frameworks fail here. Levels are written as the same statement with stronger adverbs, so there is no observable difference between level two and level three, and the framework cannot support assessment or development conversations.

The framework also had to be derived from existing job descriptions, with limited demand on the internal team.

The Solution

Ben built the framework from the client's job descriptions, with the proficiency architecture designed first.

The work involved:

• Deriving competencies from the job description library and clustering them into 15 competency domains.
• Defining five proficiency levels aligned to the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, so each level marks a real shift in autonomy, judgement and complexity.
• Writing levelled behavioural indicators for all 54 competencies, with each level describing observably different behaviour.
• Including a core competency domain covering expectations common to the whole workforce.

Results

• Delivered 54 competencies across 15 domains, each with five defined proficiency levels.
• Established a proficiency architecture that supports assessment rather than only description.