Skills, capabilities and competencies each play their own part in business planning

CANBERRA, Australia - Dec. 14, 2022 - PRLog -- Many use the terms interchangeably, but skills, capabilities and competencies each serve their own function and impact businesses in different ways. The Acorn subject matter experts recognised how easy it was for the L&D community to confuse the terms, so they developed a straightforward guide on how the three differ, their impacts and how they co-depend on each other.

Skills are a learned ability, talent or expertise needed to perform a task, usually to an industry standard or without supervision. They are primarily used for role-related items like skill statements and job descriptions, so employers can assess if a person has the foundational abilities for a role.

A competency assesses the application of a person's knowledge and skills in the workplace and creates a universal set of expectations. It is often used in performance reviews to evaluate an employee's expertise in certain capabilities. Competencies exist as a fixed scale of performance within which employees are expected to work e.g., foundational, intermediate, adept, and advanced.

A capability is a combination of personal and technical skills, knowledge, processes, tools and behaviours that are critical to an organisation's success and future needs. They are non-replicable and stable. Once core capabilities are defined, they will generally be a key driver for organisations now and into the future, even if business goals change.

"The future is capabilities, which is why you need to understand their strategic impact over the focus on employee performance that skills and competencies offer," said Blake Proberts (Co-Founder & Managing Director). "Capabilities enable you to enact business strategy through specific skills and measures of competence, ensuring your organisation is truly strategically aligned."

You can read the Acorn experts' full article comparing skills, competencies and capabilities on Acorn Labs: https://hubs.ly/Q01tYbvz0

Pursuit Technology is one of Australia's fastest growing HR technology companies. Pursuit, via Acorn LMS, takes a different view to strategically enabling HR and L&D teams compared to traditional providers. Rather than focusing on analytics after learning experience, their products use workforce planning and capability frameworks prior to any learning. By linking to a company's strategy, Pursuit products can inform organisational capability gaps and suggest education, deliver this education, then measure the impact – proving business impact by the HR and L&D team in a quantifiable way.