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Competencies in Organizational E-learning: Concepts and Tools

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Miguel-Angel Sicilia has assembled useful papers about competencies from a geographically dispersed set of authors. He defines competencies as "observable capabilities of individuals for specific work situations." (p. vi). The focus of this collection, however, is at the organizational level. The editor's stated purposes are to clarify how to define competencies, suggest how to identify "competency gaps" at the organizational level, and integrate this competency work into larger knowledge management activities. Most of the contributed chapters deal with knowledge management and software systems that support it.

The book is divided into three sections. The first five chapters introduce the basic concepts of competencies, review a broad selection of current and historical competency models, and describe their implications for employee development. They also discuss how human resources management software supports organization-wide use of competencies. These initial chapters have a practical, present-day focus that support decision-making by human resources managers.

Section II discusses competencies as key components of organizational memories--the editor's preferred term for the institutional knowledge retained as individual employees come and go. These chapters are diverse, covering such topics as knowledge management software tools, lifecycle management of knowledge, effective use of competency taxonomies, and development of e-government systems for knowledge management. Chapter X suggests we tighten our definition of competencies by considering their relative specificity, coherency, durability, activity and trainability. The trainability distinction is valuable, given that most competency approaches assume that all competencies are equally trainable. As the authors emphasize, organizations must pursue different strategies for acquiring competencies depending on whether or not employees can easily learn them.

The final Section considers what can be done with competencies as components of the "semantic web." This is an envisioned future enhancement of the web in which automated search routines create new knowledge from competency definitions and other information. These chapters are more speculative, departing from current human resources conceptions of competencies. They explore the most efficient data structures for representing competencies. Authors describe automated software that can identify "competency gaps" and support both hiring and employee development activities to close them.

This is a useful set of articles for specialists working with competencies, particularly those focusing on enterprise-level HR software systems. Good as it is, don't buy it without reading the chapter abstracts. It's more the kind of book you borrow from a university library and copy one or two chapters.