Create a competency

What this achieves

A competency is a broader capability than a single skill — leadership, or a functional area of expertise. It is built by mapping skills to it with a weight, so the competency is a structured set rather than a label.

Required role: Administrator.

Before you start

Create the skills the competency will be built from, and define the proficiency scale it will be rated against.

Steps

Go to Skills & Competencies → Competencies.
Create a new competency.
Enter its name, code, and description.
Choose the Type and Category.
Choose the proficiency scale.
Save.
On the competency, link each skill that makes it up, setting the Weight (1-10) and whether the mapping is Required.

Competency types

Option	Description
Core	Expected across the organization.
Functional	Belonging to a function or discipline.
Leadership	Concerned with leading people or direction.
Technical	A technical area of capability.

Type is how a framework stays navigable once it has grown. Core competencies apply broadly; functional and technical ones belong to particular groups.

Example: HC Corp UK Ltd holds a company-wide Core competency that applies to everyone, and Technical competencies that apply only within Engineering.

Weight and required

Each mapped skill carries a weight from 1 to 10 and a required flag.

Option	Description
Weight	How much this skill contributes to the competency, relative to the others mapped to it.
Required	Whether the mapping is marked as required.

Weighting is what stops a competency being a flat checklist. A skill central to the capability should outweigh a supporting one, so that someone strong on the essentials reads differently from someone strong only on the periphery.

Example: a Technical competency at HC Corp UK Ltd weights its core engineering skill above the supporting tooling skills, so James Whitfield’s strength on the essential skill counts for more.

Status

Option	Description
Draft	Being built.
Active	In use.
Archived	Withdrawn from use.

Archive rather than delete anything that has been used, so the history of what people were assessed against remains interpretable.

Competencies and skills answer different questions

Keep the layers distinct. A skill is specific and demonstrable, assessed and endorsed on an individual and tracked for freshness. A competency is the broader capability those skills add up to.

Putting something at the wrong layer is expensive: moving it means recreating it, since assessments belong to the entry they were made against.

What happens next

Competencies can be attached to job profiles alongside skills, which is what lets a role state the broader capability it needs rather than only a list of specifics. A skill’s own detail shows which competencies it feeds, with the weights, so you can see how one skill contributes across a framework.