As an HR professional, you are already familiar with competencies and their value for managing the proficiency levels of jobs and the needs of employees for training and professional development. But what are competencies in the field of professional certification?

In many ways, certification organization thinks about competency in the same way that an HR person does when constructing a competency model for a company.

“Certification focuses on knowing the basics, and the knowledge and earning the legitimacy to practice,” write Dave Ulrich and Wayne Brockbank, professors at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan and partners at the RBL Group. Certification, Ulrich and Brockbank say, answers the question: What do I have to be, know, and do, to be an effective HR professional?

“[Professional certification] requires partnership of HR professional associations around the world, focusing on outcomes of HR skills, aligning competencies to current and future business conditions, tailoring competencies to specific situations and identifying the competencies that matter most for business performance,” Ulrich and Brockbank conclude.

This is a good place to start when considering competency models for certification organizations.

How Other Fields View Competency

Most professions have established competencies for effectiveness. Attorneys, for example, must pass a bar exam. Psychologists are licensed after passing a standardized exam. Certified public accountants (CPAs) must pass a knowledge exam. All require foundational knowledge to enter the profession. But not all competency models are created equal.

That is, in fact, one of the greatest criticisms about competencies. There is not a single definition of what competency means. And when a competency is measured, is it measuring a baseline of skills and knowledge that a professional needs to be successful? Are there intermediate and expert levels of competence as well? How are competencies accounted for as fields swiftly evolve? What about non-functional characteristics of competence that are often not measured such as a global mindset, people leadership and creative thinking?

Future Competencies for the 21^st Century

To make it in today’s business world, leaders want people who are smart and competent. Certifications provide one way to demonstrate competence in a field. But don’t forget about other essential competencies to develop into a well-rounded professional.

The Institute for the Future for the University of Phoenix Research Institute envisions six major drivers of change for future workplaces:

• Aging global workforces.
• Increasing workplace automation that will take over repetitive tasks.
• Increasing number of sensors and processing power the make the world a programmable system.
• New communication tools that will require media literacy beyond text.
• Social technologies that will drive new forms of production and value creation.
• Global interconnectivity.

Such trends will require a host of new skills that will be as important as core professional functions. This includes sense-making, social intelligence, adaptive thinking, cross-cultural competency, computational thinking, new-media literacy, transdisciplinarity, design mindset, cognitive load management and virtual collaboration.

“To be successful in the next decade, individuals will need to demonstrate foresight in navigating a rapidly shifting landscape of organizational forms and skill requirements,” concludes the Future Work Skills 2020 report. “They will increasingly be called upon to continually reassess the skills they need, and quickly put together the right resources to develop and update these. Workers in the future will need to be adaptable lifelong learners.”

Certification is a great way to demonstrate a baseline skills, knowledge and practice-based experience needed to do the job of the HR generalist in today competitive business environment. But don’t stop there. Continue to expand your personal competencies to meet the demands of the future work-world.