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Assessing 21st Century Skills: Competency Modeling to the Rescue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2015

Katherine A. Sliter*
Affiliation:
Performance Assessment Network, Carmel, Indiana
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Katherine A. Sliter, Performance Assessment Network, 11590 North Meridian Street, Suite 200, Carmel, IN 46032. E-mail: ksliter@panpowered.com

Extract

Neubert, Mainert, Kretzschmar, and Greiff (2015) rightly argue that today's business world requires employees to frequently engage in nonroutine, creative, and interactive tasks. The authors go further to describe two potentially important skills—complex problem solving and collaborative problem solving—which they believe can address gaps in our current understanding of employee skill assessment. I contend however that the authors might be reinventing the wheel with this framework, given that the already popular practice of competency modeling satisfies the very deficiencies that the authors argue exist. To expand on this argument, I will first provide a brief history and discussion of what competency modeling is, followed by an explanation of several key benefits of this approach in terms of addressing the authors’ concerns. Then, on the basis of my applied experience as an external consultant, I will discuss how I might use competency modeling to address one of the authors’ own example scenarios, which should help identify ways in which competency modeling subsumes Neubert and colleagues’ approach.

Type
Commentaries
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2015 

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References

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