Competency-based learning is a type of learning that lays more emphasis on what employees/learners can do, rather than what they know. That means that it works on the principle that learners must demonstrate their competency in a particular area before progressing with training.

But why is it essential to implement competency-based learning in your organization? Here are a few reasons;

• It saves time

With competency-based learning, learners can skip through courses in which they have expertise. Doing that helps them to save time while focusing more on other courses to acquire new skills.

• It’s engaging

When learners get tested in areas that they don’t have much expertise, they tend to be more engaged and want to do better. So, competency-based learning can help instructors to create engagement for their learners.

Tips for designing competency-based learning

Competency-based learning focuses more on real-life applications and learners’ ability to practice skills. In this type of learning, employees get the chance to completely acquire a specific skill before progressing to the next one.

This learning approach doesn’t only engage learners but also helps them to focus their attention on developing the abilities required of them in their organizations.

Let’s have a look at a few factors that you must consider when designing competency-based learning.

1. Check your course of action

The main reason why this is essential before designing your competency-based learning is to be sure that training is the right course of action to take. So, ask yourself if there are other ways of improving your employee performance, like using other managerial actions, without having to use training.

Here are a few questions that you need to find answers to, to be sure designing training is the right thing to do. Firstly, is the performance problem an individual’s fault as a result of a lack of enough knowledge?

If yes, then you might need to progress by checking if the problem is due to a lack of sufficient tools for employees to work. Or there are not enough motivations to support them. Your response to all of these questions will tell you if you need to design your competency-based training.

2. Carryout skills assessment

Having decided to design your competency-based training, another thing to consider is your learner’s skills. One reason for that is to prevent you from creating training on skills that your employee already mastered.

Apart from that, it also prevents you from delivering training that is too complex in the case of learners with no prior skills.

The main objective of carrying out a skill assessment is to identify your learner’s skill gap. So, give out surveys or assessments to know more about what you need to test their strengths and weaknesses.

3. Identify key competencies essential to your organization

Depending on an organization’s compliance issues and objectives, some skills are more valued than others. Because of that, you must carry out a little research and identify your company’s core competencies in order of their priority.

4. Ensure you conduct regular assessments to monitor your employee performance

Another factor to consider when designing competency-based learning is conducting a regular e-learning assessment. It’s essential as it helps to monitor employee’s performance, making sure that they’re on the right path.

You can do that by introducing it as a flexible e-learning assessment at the end of each training exercise. You can use online assessments as they are highly effective, and learners can access them at their convenience.

5. Offer self-paced eLearning plans

To achieve effective competency-based learning, you must be able to plan how your learners will progress from their current skill sets and reach their potentials. However, you can perform that by introducing surveys, assessments, and focus groups to identify employee skill gaps.

Then, make use of competency-based learning to bridge it. Also, ensure you provide other online materials to aid training. However, ensure these materials are based on an individual learner’s skill gap.

6. Provide an eLearning library for the ongoing development

Providing an online training library is also one of the factors that you must consider when designing competency-based learning. The reason for that is most learners often need to refresh their memory once in a while to reinforce vital concepts after training.

So, for quick accessibility, ensure to make it a microlearning online library with different categories for different competencies.

Conclusion

There are numerous benefits attached to Implementing competency-based learning at your organization. Some of them include the following;

• It focuses on the holistic development of an individual employee.
• It focuses on mastery, ownership, and accountability.
• It’s essentially relevant to real-life problems.
• It promotes self-paced learning.