Competency Mapping for Technical Educational Institutes in India

Introduction

Competencies, or individual characteristics, first explored and analysed by McClelland in the early 1970s were recognized as major predictors of employee performance and achievement, just as important as the academic aptitude and information quality of a person as demonstrated by test scores or results (Lunev, Petrova, & Zaripova, 2013). Competency refers to an individual's underlying behavioural characteristics which are causally related to the cited criterion of successful and/or superior performance in a job or situation(Tripathi & Ranjan, 2010). It briefly describes the motives, traits, self-concept, values, knowledge or skills that a superior performer brings to the engineering educational institute. (Goldberg & Cole, 2002)research article on ‘Testing for Competence Rather than Intelligence’ introduced the skills revolution in industrial psychology. Based on the analysis of the previous research, he concluded that conventional assessments of academic aptitude and knowledge content as well as school grades and qualifications did not predict success in either job or life (Chouhan & Srivastava, 2014).

Competency Mapping is a method of defining core competencies and the roles and functions within an organization/institution and then using them for job assessment, training and development, performance management, succession planning, etc. (Kansal & Singhal, 2018). Knowledge replenishment is a major challenge facing today's engineering education system, and competence-based teaching practices have created a paradigm shift to meet and surpass those challenges (Kansal, Singhal, & Kumar, 2014). Despite the increasing awareness level, however, competence development and mapping in India remains an unexplored process in most technical educational institutes (Leavitt, Wisdom, & Leavitt, 2017). The issue is much more complex than just about finding the right faculty for the right course, and most engineering institutes have been struggling to design the right structure for their organisation (Fernández Cruz, Egido Gálvez, & Carballo Santaolalla, 2016).

Each kind of competency has its own purpose, and helps organizations to develop the skills sets for the faculty members that will ultimately help to drive the institute strategy and achieve institutional vision (Bajis, Chaar, Penm, & Moles, 2016). Skills and knowledge are usually denoted as surface competencies that are visible (Kansal & Singhal, 2017). These are relatively easy to develop and it is cost effective to train faculty members to secure these abilities. The competencies of an individual can be represented by way of defining surface competencies, which can be most easily developed. The professionalism, proactiveness, skills and knowledge of an individual can be updated by way of various training & development programmes (Kiran, Madarvalli, & Chandulal, n.d.). However the core personality of an individual e.g. creativity, initiative, information competency etc. is very difficult to develop. This is pictorially shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

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To summarize, a competency is described in terms of key behaviours that enables recognition of that competency at the work place. These behaviours are demonstrated by excellent performers on-the-job much more consistently than average or poor performers (R.Yuvaraj, 2011).