Everyone wants to be the recipient of excellent performance. Be it in a form of service or product, excellent performance will never be refused by anyone on the receiving end. However, on the giving end, things can be very subjective and blurry at times.
The question is, how does one know that the level of performance given meets the desired quality expected? How does one even stand to have a fair shot at performing if they themselves are not aware of the knowledge, skills, and other contributing factors that they need to have to begin with? It wound not be a fair playing flied if everything boils down to being lucky and gifted with natural talent.
It is with this perspective in mind, my team and I embarked in a quest to dissect ‘performance’.
It turns out that performance can be defined by measurable indicators. These may include strategic indicators that contributes to the success of the organisation; operational indicators that relates to profitability, productivity, and output; and behavioural indicators that generally reflects upholding positive values and well-mannered conduct.
Further narrowing the scope to the context of job-related performance, these indicators are often referred to as ‘set of competencies’ which consist of knowledge, skills and behaviours that ideally the employees must have to perform the task assigned.
This applies to any industry and it is no different to the training industry too. Even though one may make the assumption that trainers are better informed and familiar with performance indicators and measurements, one thing for sure is there is a need to have a taxonomy for the industry – a common description and classification of what constitutes and contributes to the delivery of the performance that will be considered as a reference.
By defining a set of competencies, even though it may be non-exhaustive at this point, it would serve as a benchmark for those involved in training and development related work to know what is to be expected of them and how they can grow in their profession.
As we identify the key knowledge, skills, and behaviours necessary, it would be easier to reach a targeted performance for the roles involved in the training industry, and then developing and optimising those competencies to best align with the bigger picture of improving the quality and livelihood of the nation’s workforce.
When we have listed these core competencies, we should be able to easily distinguish excellence in performance from non-performance and in the future, by combining several of these core competencies, may open the possibilities of developing a proper competency framework for training industry professionals.