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Top1. Introduction
Ever since the seminar work of McClelland (1973), the area of competency has been frequently researched and accepted as the ‘underlying characteristic of an individual that determines the extent of performance on a given job or task’ (Boyatzis, 1982; Quinn et.al, 1990; Spencer and Spencer,1993; Hoffmann, 1999; Cardy & Selvarajan, 2006). Good number of organizations also transformed themselves into competency based organizations acknowledging the fact about the importance of competent workforce. Increase number of people centric service organizations only supported this further (Weiland, et. al., 2012; Parkar, 2018) encouraging organizations to focus on the competency mapping and modelling process (Kett, 2011).
However, extremely people oriented humanitarian organizations whose performance often depends on the first responders on the field are yet to explore the competency research. Ever since the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2005, the disaster management research has increased its pace and multiple areas like logistics, supply chain of resources, preventive preparation etc. are analysed in depth. But the research related to human resources involved in the relief operations are yet to be studied. The increasing intensity of the disasters today have involved organizations, sometimes, across borders in the relief operations. Irrespective of the size of the disaster, it is the relief worker who alters the ‘tours of duty’ according to the nature of the disaster site and provides relief to the vulnerable (Leavy, 2015).
Analysing the context and need for developing competent workforce, it is required that a competency based capacity building initiatives are developed and utilized (also supported by McCall &Salama (1999), Chang (2005), Kovács &Tatham (2010), Kovács et. al (2012), Amalnik & Ravasan, 2018). Also, it is found that 90% of the relief workers who participated in the study conducted by Thomas & Mizushima (2005) felt that professional training was necessary and 27% of them had no access to any such training programs. Also, the study also relieved that those who had access were trained differently as per the knowledge and convenience of the trainers.
Gustavsson (2003) through a thorough experience analysis of humanitarian organizations and analyzing the context and challenges often faced by them, it is suggested that “competency based capacity building initiatives and mechanisms” are developed and supported. It was identified through the analysis that the movement of emergency relief staff is often increasing cost, there is a lack of depth of knowledge of the relief workers and low investment in the communication technology are the three major challenges faced by the humanitarian organizations. It was emphasized that the depth of knowledge to be improved through competency based knowledge systems. As an outcome of this study, World Vision International, a relief organization, started working with Australian Ministry of Education to create competency frameworks for its emergency relief personnel.
Hence, it is imperative that there is a need to develop a standard set of skills and abilities of the relief worker so that the training can be standardized. To address challenges, such as this, competency researchers have defined a comprehensive competency mapping and modelling process so as to create a standard of expectations for a specific job (Draganidis & Mentzas, 2006; Naqvi, 2009; Uddin et. Al. 2012). The current study attempts to define and execute a competency mapping process for the emergency relief workers who have to adapt according to the nature and complexity of the disasters yet perform to the best of their skills.
Majority of the skill models defined for the humanitarian logistics operations, are adopted from the business logistics. Though the corporate logistics organizations form one of the actors in emergency relief (Cozzolino, 2012), their models cannot be used because their primary focus is on saving costs not human lives. They operate more controlled communication networks, predictable demand and customer behavior with a perceived difference of speed (Walton et al., 2011). Hence, it is important to create competency models derived from the humanitarian space.