A prominent family-owned holding company in Saudi Arabia contracted MENTOR to develop a technical competency framework for the entire group and its 25 subsidiaries. The challenge for the company lay in implementing a competency model that covered thousands of roles in various locations, spanning a wide range of sectors.
Following this, it also needed to carry out an assessment of over 3000 staff across the group. The assessment was to help make informed decisions on the performance management and learning and development of employees, and evaluate them based on the specific competencies required for their roles. MENTOR was contracted to deliver both projects in succession.
Project 1 technical competency framework
The first project was carried out in four stages. It began with the collection and review of relevant documentation, meeting the main stakeholders, and grouping jobs into job families, with a technical competency framework to be developed for each job family. Representatives from the job families were identified and assigned authority to approve their corresponding competency framework further on in the project.
The next stage entailed data gathering and analysis sessions with job family representatives and relevant stakeholders to understand the work nature and responsibilities of job families and roles, and identify the technical competencies required for each job family. This was followed by the development of the technical competency framework for each job family, and its review and approval.
The final stage involved knowledge transfer sessions for HR employees and other relevant stakeholders to facilitate the frameworks implementation in HR processes.
The outcome of the project was a technical competency framework that was aligned with Al-Kifahs strategic direction, culture, manpower planning and diverse areas of operation. We also provided direction on how to implement the framework successfully to support HR and talent management practices.
Project 2 employee assessment
For the second project, MENTOR worked with the client to create a standardized process to facilitate regular evaluation of employees on behavioral (core and leadership) competencies required for each role as per the organizations competency framework.
The project was in two parts:
Manager assessment: Design of a 2-part assessment exercise involving employees evaluation by their managers, in addition to their own self-appraisal with the aim of improving performance.
Self-assessment: Development of a self-evaluation assessment for employees with the aim of helping HR determine training needs of each employee.
Our role was to develop the assessment questionnaire content, scoring methodology and individual/ summative report templates. Considering the size of the workforce, it was important to pilot the process first for testing and feedback, and amend as needed before complete roll-out.
With an insightful approach used in the questionnaire development and analysis, and controlled testing of the process, the new assessment tools were introduced across the groups subsidiaries with great ease and success.
Competency Assessment Talent
