Skills Assessment: The Competency-Based Approach Explained
The practice of the skills assessment, established for several years, is undergoing significant changes. The way individuals are evaluated and supported in their career paths is increasingly shifting towards a competency-based approach. This approach values knowledge and individual potential differently, offers greater flexibility and facilitates career transitions towards a wider range of opportunities.
By placing competencies at the centre of the assessment, this method ensures fairer recognition of profiles and a closer alignment with recruiters’ expectations. Let us look at how it shapes career paths and opens up new career opportunities.
Importance of Competency-Based Approach in Skills Assessments
Long centred on job-based analysis, the practice of skills assessments has had to evolve in response to a simple observation: jobs change too quickly to serve as a reliable reference point. Boundaries between roles are becoming blurred, new positions emerge while others disappear, making traditional reference points less relevant.
Studies have shown that nearly one skill in three required to obtain a job in 2018 is no longer required today. Hard skills, long considered a reliable foundation for evaluating individuals, quickly become obsolete. They are no longer sufficient to build solid and sustainable career support.
Soft Skills: The New Core of Skills Assessments
Today, it is no longer the mastery of technical skills linked to a specific job that lies at the heart of assessments. Instead, the focus is on a person’s ability to unlearn in order to relearn more effectively, their proactivity in keeping their knowledge up to date, and their ability to transfer new learning into their work environment. The central challenge has shifted: it now revolves around what the individual “knows how to be” rather than what they know how to do.
These behavioural competencies are measured through transferable skills: skills that enable individuals to move more easily between roles and that provide a comprehensive understanding of a person by highlighting who they are and what they may become. The competency-based approach therefore considers the whole career journey, giving it meaning and opening the way to new possibilities.
Benefits of the Competency-Based Approach
Valuing Diverse Experiences
The competency-based approach recognises all of an individual’s experiences, whether professional or personal. It highlights each person’s potential by valuing unconventional career paths and uncommon abilities, including mad skills — capabilities developed through personal passions or unique life experiences, often overlooked in a traditional job-based approach. A project manager who has completed expeditions in extreme environments, for example, may demonstrate strong competencies in stress management and complex problem solving.
Aligning individuals with Job Market
Organisations now seek profiles capable of adapting, collaborating and learning continuously. The competency-based approach highlights precisely these transferable abilities — critical thinking, communication, learning agility, stress management — which are central to recruiters’ expectations. The result is better alignment with the labour market and stronger employability.
Expanding Career Opportunities
The transferable nature of competencies facilitates career transitions into sectors and roles that might have seemed inaccessible with a purely job-based approach. This flexibility broadens the range of possible career projects, grounding them more closely in each individual’s aspirations and talents while also responding to real market needs.
Skills Assessment, a Powerful Tool for Professional Development
The competency-based approach offers a renewed perspective on individuals’ potential. By focusing on behavioural competencies and transferable skills, it improves alignment with labour market needs while highlighting the richness of individual career paths.
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