Competency mapping for SMEs: Defining what good looks like.
Imagine you hired a general contractor to come and paint the exterior of your home. You’ve been putting this task off for a while and there is a lot of work to be done. The paint is peeling in places, previous colours are showing through…it’s a mess. You are proud of yourself for finally getting yourself organised and you can’t wait to have friends over for dinner on your balcony once the work is complete.
Now imagine coming home after the contractor has finished to find paint brush strokes along the edges of your windows, splashes of paint all over your balcony, paint cans and a ladder all left behind. Was the exterior painted? Yep. Did the contractor do a good job? Not so much.
This same logic applies to all jobs. The example I’ve given uses a manual job as an example, but this exercise works equally well for all professions from nursing to sales to mining. There is a difference between done and done well, and this is where competency mapping comes in. It clearly articulates what good looks like.
A competency map breaks a role into three layers:
The domain — the broad area of the job, like client communication or quality control.
The specific skill within that domain — preparing surfaces, priming and painting, choosing the correct paint. And;
An observable behaviour — what someone actually does when they're good at it: paints in long, even strokes,protects areas that are not to be painted, cleans up the site when work is finished.
When a company defines a skill as "Good painting” it’s less a standard and more an assumption that everyone has the same standard for what good looks like. Good painting will look differently for someone who just started than for a veteran with ten years experience. When we start to get more explicit about what good looks like ie. "Protect surfaces from paint spills" or “ensure no paint drips remain” now there is something you can observe, coach toward, and interview for.
A competency map also allows room for skill to grow by identifying behaviour by proficiency level — foundational, intermediate, advanced, expert. A new hire and a ten-year employee aren't measured against the same bar. That distinction matters when the question of employee development comes into play: without it, a company either sets the bar too high for someone still learning the role, or too low for the person who's ready for more.
As an SME owner, your people are the engine of your business. Assuming everyone shares the same definition of what success looks like is a risk you cannot afford to take. It’s not only critical for hiring, but also for maintaining your workforce and succession planning.
