How Competency Science Will Shape the Future of Work

How AI is Changing the Land of Career Development
The future of work is being shaped by two forces: artificial intelligence and a shift towards competency-based organizations. Traditional functional jobs, which are typically siloed by departments, are now giving way to more fluid and flexible ways of working by organizing people around projects, tasks and deliverables. 

Building a team isn’t just about finding experts—it’s about finding the right people and placing them in the right roles. In an age where digitization has the potential to reshape the talent market, competency science and machine learning are uniquely positioned to help business executives reshape the future of work. Given that 71% of workers already perform work outside the scope of their job description, it’s no surprise that leaders are seeking out ways to better meet their organization’s goals by matching their workforce’s skills and capabilities to perform work across functional boundaries. 

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Why Competency Science?
Ensuring that your organization has the right talent to execute your business strategy can be time consuming; leveraging competency-based platforms like Claira can help leaders optimize their internal talent marketplace by matching their team’s skill sets to projects and tasks.

Whether it's implementing corporate strategy using insights, reducing costs via automation, or visualizing data with a purpose, machine learning and AI can help leaders understand their workforce and uncover their true potential.

Today, the AI that is needed to transform organizations from being defined by job functions into competency-based organizations already exists, yet according to Deloitte, only 48% of HR professionals are confident that the human capabilities they have documented on their workforce are verified and valid. As organizations move towards this new competency-based approach, documenting each individual’s hard skills, human capabilities, adjacent skills, and their potential is critical to helping leaders redeploy their people—and competency science is the essence of understanding the granular details of the internal mobility of your talent. 

Resumes rarely provide a robust picture of an individual’s true competencies: They fail to highlight someone’s abilities and talents beyond what’s on paper. When nearly 70% of competencies are shared across industries, it’s critical for organizations to buy into a skills-based approach that will drive the most value. That’s where platforms like Claira come in: creating direct value by mapping out a firm’s human capital—but digitally. 

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Retention Through Engagement
By providing employees with clear opportunities for growth and satisfaction, leaders can also improve retention and organizational performance in the process. At Claira, we found that competency-based organizations are 98% more likely to retain high performers, 52% more likely to innovate, and 57% more likely to anticipate change and respond effectively and efficiently. When people are placed into the right roles, workers are 79% more likely to have a positive workforce experience. 

Organizations that view their people as unique individuals, who can add value to the company given their portfolio of skills, are far more likely to increase retention than organizations that view their people only as workers. Investing in competency-based AI performance management systems can help leaders keep their employees motivated and engaged—all while understanding where each individual’s values, motivations, and drivers lie. 

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Agility and Precision in the Age of Competency-Based Organizations
Leaders who leverage competency science and machine learning can realize up to a 107% increase in placing talent effectively. Claira’s dynamic platform provides business leaders with continuous value, generating competencies from new and unbiased datasets that improve over time. 

Aligning organizational strategy to match a team’s competencies can enable leaders to unleash the true human potential of their workforce. Legacy systems are centered on experience and keywords, missing key details needed to optimally match people to roles and determine advancement gaps. Leveraging a competency-based framework for human resource management presents a tremendous opportunity for professionals seeking to adapt their processes, especially when it comes to identifying what’s working and where to optimize for success.