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Core skills, Competencies, and Best Practices

CORE SKILLS,
COMPETENCI
ES, AND
BEST
PRACTICES
INDIVIDUAL
ASSIGNMENT
MGT 790
Shahirah Khairudin
2014309071

Core skills, Competencies, and Best Practices

What are core skills?

Core skills are skills that that are needed in in a working environment. The term
core skills are synonym to key skills, soft skills, personal skills and etc. that
support competence performance in all fields ( (Gibbons-Wood & Lange, 2000).
Different working environments require different skills or different stages of
development. However, there is no requirement that every personnel have to
expert in every skill as every work role has its own unique set of priority.
Individual skills can be acquired and developed over time and they are
influenced by several factors such as opportunities to learn and practice, related
courses, employers and supervisors supports, workplace value and culture, level
of autonomy, complexity of task, and etc.
Core skills in working environment can be divided into personal skills,
people skills, applied knowledge, and workplace skills as depicted in the figure
below.

PERSONAL SKILLS
Integrity
Initiative
Dependability &
Reliability
Adaptability
Professionalism

APPLIED
KNOWLELDGE
Reading
Writing
Mathematics
Science
Technology
Critical
Thinking

PEOPLE SKILLS
Teamwork
Communication
Respect

WORKPLACE SKILLS
Planning &
Organizing
Problem Solving
Decision Making
Business
Fundamentals
Customer Focus

Core skills, Competencies, and Best Practices

Figure 1: Adopted from A foundation for success in the workplace: The skills all
employees need, no matter where they work

Competencies and Core Skills

Competencies in working environment perspective are set of skills and functional

capabilities of an employee in the organization (Silberman, 2013). Employee is
competence if they can proficiently perform their job. For example an account
executive core responsibility is to prepare a full set of accounts and have to
report it quarterly. Skills required in performing his responsibility are a
combination of computer literate, meticulous, able to operate and use the
accounting system, planning and organizing, and etc. He can be said as a
competence employee when he is able to achieve his own goal by produce the
accounting reports on time or earlier. Competence employee is vital for the
organization as it could ensure a good strategy execution. Without competence
employee, a good strategy can only look good on paper but could not be
executed well and this will give a bad reputation for the organization.
Competencies can change and progressing over time. Hence, here comes
the importance of training for employees so that they can gain new things and
enhance their skills. This can be a win-win situation for the organization and for
the employees. Highly competence employees enable organization to achieve its
goal and for that, the employee will be rewarded with raise in salary and
promotion. This is how skills and competencies relate to each other.
From the perspective of the organization as a whole, core skill is the key
pieces in the business such as supply chain management, R&D, production, sales
promotions, distributions, and customer services. Core competencies can be
defined as the organizations proficiency in performing the internal activities that
is central to the organizations strategy and competitiveness.

Best Practices

Core skills, Competencies, and Best Practices

The implementation of best practice is essential in the organizations. Jan Duffy
defines best practice as processes that represent the most effective way of
achieving a specific objective

(Graybill, et al., 2013). If we go in depth and

more detail, best practice is a method of performing an activity or business

process that consistently delivers superior results compared to other approaches.
To qualify as legitimate best practice, the organization must employ methods
that are effective in lowering cost, improving quality of performance, shortening
time requirements, enhancing safety, or achieving some other highly positive
operating outcome (Thompson, Peteraf, Gamble, & Strickland, 2016).
The essence of identifying best practices is transferring knowledge from
those who know how to do something well to those who are keen to learn more
(Graybill, et al., 2013). Benchmarking is the backbone of the process of
transferring

knowledge

by

identifying,

studying,

and

implementing

best

practices. Benchmarking is a practice of learning from others and it emphasizes

on so-called breakthrough improvements ( Andersen, Fagerhaug, Randml,
Schuldmaier, & Prenninger, 1999). Xerox and Toyota is the best example of
organization that is excellent in benchmarking approaches.

Conclusion
Core skills, competencies, and best practices are the trio that enables
organization to achieve its goals and excel in their area. Competencies show that
the company has good strategy execution and strong management. While best
practices transport the company to a level of excellent.

References
Andersen, B., Fagerhaug, T., Randml, S., Schuldmaier, J., & Prenninger, J.
(1999). Benchmarking supply chain management: finding best practices.
Gibbons-Wood, D., & Lange, T. (2000). Developing core skills - lessons from
Germany and Sweden.
Graybill, J., Taesil, M., Carpenter, H., Offord Jr, J., Piorun, M., & Shaffer, G. (2013).
Employee onboarding: identification of best practices in ACRL libraries.
Silberman, J. (2013). Organizational Employee Core Competencies Best Practices.

Core skills, Competencies, and Best Practices

Thompson, A., Peteraf, M., Gamble, J., & Strickland, A. (2016). Crafting and
Executing Strategy: The Quest for Competetive Advantage Concepts and
Cases. Mc Graw Hill.