Competencies

Competencies are defined as the knowledge, skills, abilities and behaviours that employees use in performing their work.

Recognizing that employees are its most important resource, the Government of Canada has adopted a framework for competency-based management (CBM) that emphasizes the management of human resources to achieve both excellence in performance and results that are relevant to an organization's business strategies.

Because the federal public service is governed by specific statutes and regulations, anyone applying CBM needs to ensure, among other things, that:

competencies assessed are both observable and measurable with established relevance to the work and work description
care is taken to ensure that competencies are not excessively restrictive in order to avoid cultural bias
competencies rated are in fact essential, while allowing for reasonable accommodation.

Evaluating competencies

The Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer has programs and resources to support a systematic approach in evaluating employees’ competencies.