Learning and capability
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9 min read
Key findings
Competence describes the minimum standard of a job, so a framework of competencies alone says little about the next level.
In a study of 4,492 people, 54 per cent of rating variance came from the rater and 21 per cent from the person rated.
SHRM's 2026 skills-first study ranks the lack of tools for assessing skills among the top barriers, at 29 per cent of HR professionals.
A descriptor is usable when two assessors reading it would look for the same evidence, which a two-hour test with four managers checks.
Six to eight clusters per role family cover most organisational decisions, and a framework with no attached decision has one use a year.
Buckingham reports that 54 per cent of the variance in those ratings came from the idiosyncratic tendencies of the rater.
A competency framework is a set of behaviours, grouped into six to eight clusters per role family, that feeds a decision such as selection or promotion.
It stays in use when each descriptor names an observable act, and two assessors reading it would look for the same evidence.
The framework most HR teams inherit runs to forty-two behaviours across five levels and appears once a year in the appraisal form.
Managers complete it by picking the description closest to what they already thought.
A new head of function asks whether it is fit for purpose, and nobody can name a decision it has changed.
The sequence below runs from the work to the descriptor, then to the test before launch and the conversation with a sponsor who wants forty items.
Competencies And Skills
The two words are used interchangeably, and the SHRM and SHRM Foundation skills-first study of 2026 does the same.
A skill is a specific, teachable ability with an observable output, such as writing a reinsurance treaty or configuring a firewall rule.
A competency is a cluster of behaviour that shows up across situations, such as influencing without authority.
Skills attach to tasks and expire, and competencies attach to roles and travel with the person.
The distinction matters more as skills-first practice spreads.
In the SHRM study, 70 per cent of HR professionals expect skills-first practices to play a larger role in hiring over the next three years.
Furnham, MacRae and Reed point out that competence implies the minimum level of performance, while expertise and mastery imply the optimal levels.
A framework written only at the level of competence therefore describes the floor of a job, and a promotion decision needs evidence about the next job.
Give the two instruments separate work.
Competencies carry selection, promotion and development conversations.
Skills carry deployment, sourcing and workforce planning, and that work starts from a different place, set out in building a skills inventory from the work.
Parts Of A Framework
Published guides describe the same parts.
Core competencies that apply to every role
Functional competencies tied to a profession or position
Leadership competencies for people who manage others
Core values, in some versions
They agree on the build sequence too, which runs from purpose through information gathering and writing to rollout and revision.
That sequence is sound, and the guides stop before the questions that decide whether a framework is used.
Most give no count of competencies, no scale for judging a behaviour, no test of whether two assessors agree, and no owner after launch.
The sections below answer those four.
Why Frameworks Stop Being Used
Four failures account for most abandoned frameworks, and three of them are design faults rather than adoption problems.
Generic descriptors. Text written to apply everywhere cannot be assessed anywhere, and two managers read "demonstrates strategic thinking" as different behaviour
Too many items. A manager facing forty behaviours skims, and skimming produces the halo effect the framework was meant to prevent
No attached decision. A framework that feeds only the appraisal form has one use a year and no consequence
Levels that describe seniority. Descriptors that differ only by the size of the scope describe the job rather than the person in it
The CIPD factsheet on competency frameworks, dated 21 November 2025, credits well-built frameworks with clearer performance expectations.
It also cautions that detail has to be balanced with flexibility, because an overly prescriptive framework excludes people.
Assessment is a recurring barrier.
The SHRM and SHRM Foundation study was fielded in October 2025 with 1,184 US HR professionals.
In it, the lack of established tools or processes for assessing skills was one of the top barriers to skills-first hiring, at 29 per cent.
Inconsistent practices across teams reached 25 per cent.
What Ratings Measure
Assessment decides the outcome because raters disagree for reasons that have little to do with the person rated.
Scullen, Mount and Goff, in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2000, analysed ratings of 4,492 people made by two bosses, two peers and two direct reports.
Buckingham reports that 54 per cent of the variance in those ratings came from the idiosyncratic tendencies of the rater.
Only 21 per cent came from the performance of the person rated.
Buckingham also notes the lack of credible research showing that the best performers possess an entire list of competencies.
A descriptor that asks the assessor to judge a trait will therefore measure the assessor.
A descriptor that asks the assessor to confirm an act gives the rater's own tendencies less to work with.
A descriptor that will carry a decision needs an evidence standard, and three rules set it.
The assessor has seen the behaviour at first hand, or names a witness
The example falls within the last twelve months and is dated
A second assessor can find the same example in writing
Rebuilding Around The Work
The sequence that produces a usable framework runs from the work.
Take a regional insurer whose Head of Claims wants a framework for promotion from adjuster to senior adjuster.
The Head of Claims names the first decision the framework will feed, which is the three promotions due this year
Two senior adjusters list the ten hardest claims handled in the past twelve months
For each claim, they write down who decided what, and which decision a weaker adjuster would have got wrong
They describe what the adjuster did in sentences with a subject and a verb
The HR business partner groups the descriptions into six to eight clusters and names each by the work
A level is written only where the senior adjuster behaves differently from the adjuster
The senior adjusters decide what good looks like, the HR business partner draws it out and edits it, and the Head of Claims signs it off as owner.
Six to eight clusters per role family cover the decisions most organisations take.
Frameworks that grow past twelve are usually written for completeness rather than for use.
A Descriptor That Can Be Assessed
A usable descriptor names an observable act, a context and a standard.
A weak version reads "communicates effectively with customers".
A usable version reads "explains a declined claim to the customer in one call, in plain language, and records the customer's understanding on the file".
The second can be evidenced, disputed and coached.
The test is whether two assessors reading it would look for the same thing.
Where they would not, the descriptor is a value statement and belongs in the introduction.
Parts Of One Entry
A template entry for one cluster holds six items.
Cluster name, taken from the work
The decision the cluster feeds
Descriptor with act, context and standard
The shift from the level below
Two dated examples of evidence
Business owner and review date
An entry with all six can be assessed, challenged and kept current by someone other than its author.
Levels That Differ In Work
Most level descriptors differ by scope, so they describe a bigger version of the same job.
Clark, writing in the ATD Talent Management Handbook, describes the Charan, Drotter and Noel leadership pipeline.
Each level in that model is a different job, and each passage between levels requires shifts in three areas.
Those areas are skill requirements, time applications and work values.
Clark adds that a tiered competency model should state the performance standard for each level and the key shifts a person must make between levels.
Write a level only where the senior adjuster does something the adjuster does not, and name the shift as a new skill, a longer horizon or a different priority.
Levels written this way also supply the descriptors a job architecture needs, and that sequence is covered in job architecture before pay bands.
A promotion process that produces a written gap statement for every candidate has turned a framework into an instrument.
Testing Before Launch
A framework can be tested in two hours, and almost none are.
Give four managers the same three anonymised cases and ask each to assess against the draft.
Collect each rating with one sentence of the evidence behind it.
Where the ratings diverge, the descriptor is ambiguous.
Where the ratings agree and the reasoning differs, the descriptor is being read as a proxy for something else, such as seniority or likeability.
Both findings are cheap to fix before launch and expensive afterwards.
Employers say reliable assessment is what they lack.
In the SHRM study, 85 per cent of HR professionals said a reliable way to assess skills would make their organisation more likely to regard a candidate as qualified.
After the descriptors that failed are rewritten, the same cases go to four different managers.
Buying Versus Building
Most organisations should buy the skeleton and write the flesh.
An external framework supplies structure, vocabulary and a defensible basis, and it arrives generic by design.
The layer worth the practitioner's time is what the behaviour means in this organisation, at this size, in these roles.
Three rules keep the purchase from becoming the project.
Take the subset that maps to one role family
Rewrite every descriptor you will assess against
Agree the first decision before touching the architecture
The Sponsor Who Wants Forty
The first question for the head of function is which decision the framework should change, and the answer fixes the role family to start with.
Sponsors then ask for comprehensiveness, because a short framework looks unfinished.
Three sentences usually settle the conversation with the head of function.
Every item we add is an item a manager will skim, and skimming is what produced the current ratings.
The decisions we take need eight clusters, and I can show which decision each one feeds.
We can add more once any of the eight fails to separate two candidates.
The last offer is genuine, and it is almost never taken up.
The conversation also fixes the owner.
The head of function who accepts eight clusters should name the person in the business who will review them each year.
Promotion Decisions And Frameworks
The clearest test of a framework is whether it changes a promotion argument.
Three moves make that happen.
Ask the proposing manager to evidence three clusters rather than describe the person
Ask what the person has not yet had to do that the next level requires
Record the answer, because it becomes the development plan whichever way the decision goes
A promotion process that produces a written gap statement for every candidate has turned a framework into an instrument.
The same evidence rule holds in a calibration meeting, as described in performance ratings under pressure.
Questions From The Descriptors
A framework earns its cost quickly when it feeds selection, because it supplies the interview questions.
Each cluster produces one past-behaviour question and one probe.
The question reads, describe a time you secured agreement between two functions with competing priorities, and the probe reads, what did the other party want that you could not give.
Scored against the written descriptor, that pair produces evidence rather than impression.
How well structured interviews predict performance is covered in what selection methods predict.
A framework that supplies interview questions is used at every hire, and each use shows which descriptors are unclear.
Keeping A Framework Current
Frameworks decay because the work changes and the document does not.
Three practices keep one current without a rebuild.
Review one role family a year rather than the whole framework every four
Add a descriptor only by removing one, which holds the size
Give each family an owner in the business rather than in HR
The owner in the business will notice when the framework stops describing the work, which the HR team often does not.
Where The Tools Sit
Trusted Talent Advisor holds the capability architecture and the descriptor standard in component 01, The Core Practitioner Guide.
The evidence test that separates observation from inference is in component 06, Evidence and Impact.
Its Talent Template Pack includes the capability gap analysis and the role specification.
Sources
1. Society for Human Resource Management and SHRM Foundation. The Skills-First Movement: Redefining How Organizations Hire and Grow. SHRM, 2026.
2. Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Competence and Competency Frameworks, factsheet of 21 November 2025. CIPD.
3. Buckingham, M. StandOut: Next-Generation Performance Management, citing Scullen, S. E., Mount, M. K. and Goff, M., Journal of Applied Psychology, 2000, in Bickham, T. (ed.) ATD Talent Management Handbook. ATD Press.
4. Clark, L. Building a Leadership Development Strategy, citing Charan, R., Drotter, S. and Noel, J., in Bickham, T. (ed.) ATD Talent Management Handbook. ATD Press.
5. Furnham, A., MacRae, I. and Reed, M. High Potential: How to Spot, Manage and Develop Talented People at Work. Bloomsbury.
From the system
Trusted Talent Advisor sets out the full method: seven components, 51 tools, The Talent Template Pack and The Prompt Library.
See the system
Questions this answers
What is a competency framework?
A competency framework is a structured set of behaviours, grouped into clusters for a role family, that describes what good performance looks like and feeds decisions such as selection, promotion and development. Each descriptor should name an observable act, a context and a standard.
How do you build a competency framework?
Name the first decision the framework will feed, list the hardest pieces of work in the role family, record who decided what in each, describe good practice in sentences, group the descriptions into six to eight clusters, and write levels only where behaviour differs.
What is the difference between a skill and a competency?
A skill is a specific, teachable ability with an observable output, such as configuring a firewall rule. A competency is a cluster of behaviour that shows up across situations, such as influencing without authority. Skills attach to tasks and expire, while competencies attach to roles.
How many competencies should a framework have?
Six to eight clusters per role family cover the decisions most organisations take. A manager facing forty items skims, and skimming brings back the halo effect. A framework past twelve is usually written for completeness rather than for use.
Why do competency frameworks fail?
Four faults account for most failures: generic descriptors that cannot be assessed, too many items, no attached decision, and levels that differ only by scope. Assessment is the weak point, because one large study found 54 per cent of rating variance came from the rater.
How do you test a competency framework before launch?
Give four managers the same three anonymised cases and ask each for a rating and one sentence of evidence. Divergent ratings mean an ambiguous descriptor. Agreement with different reasoning means the descriptor is read as a proxy for something else.
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