One of the fastest growing manufacturing sites in the Middle East is a petrochemical facility in Bahrain owned by the Gulf Petrochemical Industries Company (GPIC). The producer of ammonia, urea, and methane is under competitive pressures to develop and maintain a skilled employee base in both technical and nontechnical areas.

To help meet its proficiency goals, the company's Training and Development Mentoring Committee launched a competency-based program last year that readily evaluates employee skills gaps and addresses them efficiently. The goal is to evaluate existing skills and convert the assessment into a competency-based training program.

Since the company had instituted an SAP enterprise software system three years earlier for certain departments, including HR, it made sense to implement SAP's workforce training and development module. Doing so would enable it to identify the competencies required of every job function and determine the training needed to develop them.

The company's training department, the Academy of Leadership and Learning, began the task by meeting with line managers to obtain the requirements of every job under each one's responsibility. (The position requirements are obtained from the job descriptions provided by HR.) Second, it asked the line managers to provide evaluations of each employee, classifying skills under four competency levels: awareness, basic, skilled, and mastery and development. Both data sets were loaded into the SAP system.

It then asked each manager to log in and conduct "profile matchups" for every employee he supervises. The result was a list of competency gaps, both technical and nontechnical—information to be shared with managers and the training department. Since each competency is linked to a specific training course, the exercise immediately identifies the necessary training.

Next to come is a plan to deliver individual prebooked courses targeted by the program for each worker, a development task expected to take two years. Content will be delivered in a variety of formats, including instructor-led, on-the-job training, and e-learning, according to one training executive.

One of the program's most innovative features involves the creation of color-coded competency reports issued for each employee. The text for each competency mentioned in the reports is written in colors corresponding to competency rankings so that line managers can quickly determine each employee's competencies.

For example, green text designates that the individual is competent in a given job skill, red text indicates that additional training in that competency is required, and blue text means that on-the-job training is advised. Evaluations are updated following course completion so that line managers and the training department can follow each individual's progress.

When the program is completed, GPIC plans to link the SAP training module with SAP's performance management module, an official says.

Management of competency-based training is spelled out in a nine-step program. Elements include creation of a competency-based catalog containing all relevant competencies for each section and department; a precise training plan containing all prebooked courses compiled by a training needs officer; and detailed evaluations.