A Competency Mapping Framework for Indian Services Sector

Economic liberalization policies adopted by the lawmakers in the last decade of the previous century have resulted in steady growth in India's GDP and the share of services sector in this growth story is remarkable. At present services sector contributes to Indian economy in a significant manner by providing huge employment scope for the youths and also by ensuring steady flow of money to the exchequer through services tax. Unlike manufacturing, the services sector depend heavily on people or the employees due to the inherent characteristics of services like intangibility and perishability and that is why the success of a services based company depends mostly on the capacity and ability of its employees in providing excellent services to the customers successfully. In India services sector companies ranging from telecom, softwares to banking, insurance and financial services face a challenging task to recruit develop and retain skilled and effective manpower and that is why HR experts and consultants are worried about the future growth of services sector in India. In most of the services sector firms Competency Mapping is being used as a process to identify key competencies for the organization and/or a particular job and based on that the identified competencies are being incorporated throughout the various processes (i.e. job evaluation, training, recruitment) of the firm. This process starts with a job analysis with a goal to gather from employees what they feel are the key behaviors necessary to perform their respective jobs. Using the results of the job analysis, a competency based job description is being developed. With a competency based job description, the mapping of the competencies throughout the human resources processes is being done. The competencies of the respective job description become the factors for assessment on the performance evaluation. But this traditional process is incomplete because it does not take into account the customers' perceptions and expectations from the employees of a services firm. Recent empirical study shows in the context of banking and financial sector that customers' satisfaction depends heavily on some factors related with certain skills and behaviors of the employees of the firm. So it is necessary to incorporate the customers' views and thoughts in identifying competencies for a particular job which involves frequent customer interaction. This paper attempts to develop a framework through which the competencies for a job can be identified from all directions – be it employees or be it customers and thus the proposed framework makes the competency mapping process more prudent and effective for the services sector firms in present Indian economic scenario