A Primer on Competency Dictionaries: Building a Shared Language for Performance
When a department manager describes an employee as 'needing to develop communication skills,' what exactly does that mean? Report writing? Running meetings? Negotiating with clients? Without a shared language, conversations about performance become personal impressions that can be neither measured nor trained. This is where a competency dictionary comes in: a reference document that defines each competency precisely and describes its observable behaviours across graduated proficiency levels, becoming a common foundation for hiring, evaluation, training, and promotion.
A Competency Is Not a Skill — So What Is It?
A skill is a specific, directly learnable capability, like using Excel or writing meeting minutes. A competency is an integrated blend of knowledge, skill, and behaviour that shows up in actual performance and leads to an organizational result. 'Analytical thinking,' for example, is a competency combining knowledge of analysis tools, skill in using them, and a methodical behaviour when facing problems. A good dictionary typically classifies competencies into three families: core competencies shared by everyone in the organization, leadership competencies for those who manage teams, and technical competencies specific to each job family.
Proficiency Levels: The Beating Heart of the Dictionary
The real value of the dictionary lies not in defining competencies but in describing their levels. The common standard is four to five levels per competency, each describing observable behaviours any assessor can verify. The difference between 'applies,' 'develops,' and 'leads' must be made clear through behavioural examples, not generic adjectives. This gradation is what later enables gap measurement: when we know a role requires level three in a competency and the employee is at level one, the gap becomes specific and translatable into a precise training path.
Where Should Your Organization Start?
Start small and smart: choose fifteen to twenty essential competencies rather than building an encyclopedia of hundreds of entries nobody uses. Anchor each competency to two sources: your organization's strategy on one side, and relevant national and sector frameworks on the other. Then run workshops with leaders and top performers to extract the actual behaviours that distinguish high performance in your specific environment — a dictionary copied from another organization remains a foreign body no matter how elegant its wording.
Finally, remember that the dictionary is a living document: review it at least every two years, and wire it practically into your evaluation and training systems so it does not become a forgotten file. At POTC we have built competency dictionaries and training matrices for government entities and major companies as part of our consulting and training portfolio services, and we know the most successful dictionaries are the simplest to use. If you are considering building one for your organization, we would be glad to share working models from our projects.