Understanding General and Technical Competencies

For an organization to thrive, its general and technical competencies must be very clear to the decision-makers. Only after knowing your company’s strengths and weaknesses can you work towards improvements and take on challenging projects with confidence.

If you don’t know what general and technical competencies are, this short read will give you a clear picture of both, so make sure to stick until the end. That said, let’s dive right in:

General Competencies:

Also known as behavioral competencies, or sometimes soft skills, general competencies are crucial in almost every situation and for every occupation. These are the traits, abilities, and motivations needed for effective performance in a broad spectrum of jobs throughout the organization. Let’s take a gander at an example to get a clear picture of what these competencies are:

Example:

General traits that are not directly related to the job but needed for effectiveness and efficiency like achievement orient mindset, interactive communication, social responsibility, self-motivation, and so on. As you can see, an individual possessing these soft skills are likely to perform well and bring value to the organization.

Technical Competencies:

General competencies are only going to work if you use them in combination with technical competencies. This is because the latter ones are the ‘specific skills’ required to get the job done to get expected outcomes. Being an excellent communicator, which is a general competency, is great, but if someone doesn’t know how to sell things to customers, which is a technical competency; they cannot succeed in sales. So in retrospect, we can see that having a combo of both competencies is crucial to get a job done and be a good employee in the organizational space.

Example:

An aeronautical engineer needs to know the technical skills to fix a plane because general competencies are useless when in the field. However, when in the organizational space, knowing technical stuff won’t suffice; your soft skills will help you be a good employee and increase your chances of climbing the corporate ladder.

Why Do These Competencies Need To Be Identified?

There are several valid reasons behind why you need to identify technical and general competencies; some of the key ones are given below:

• Identifying them helps you with effective resource allocation
• Allows you to discover the best opportunities and projects that match with your organization’s core competencies
• It helps you find out where you lack so you can educate and train your team to overcome those obstacles
• You discover the services and tasks you can outsource to save in-house resources and time
• If you know what your strengths are, you can market and brand your business with full transparency and confidence

Final Words:

Not identifying the competencies of your company and workforce is like shooting arrows in the dark – you don’t know what you’re capable of and where you lack. This can result in disappointing outcomes for you and your clients. So, you need to explore the competencies of your workforce to meet your organizational goals and put a smile on your clients’ faces.

Luckily, here at Workitect, our core competencies are to help organizations identify theirs. Our team of highly acclaimed professionals will work with you and figure out your competencies and areas that need improvement with pinpoint accuracy so you can crush the competition and make your customers rave about you.

For additional information, call 800-870-9490, email edward.cripe@workitect.com
or use the contact form at Workitect.

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