Competence-based approaches in organizational and individual context

With an increasing pace of digitalization, automatization, and robotization, firms need to quickly anticipate new consumer values, trends, and needs and adjust their production, thus requiring constant adaptation of competences and competence-based models. This review: (1) briefly outlines the development of competence-based models; (2) presents difficulties when defining and delineating differences between competences, skills, and abilities; (3) presents the main challenges of competence measurement; (4) presents recent findings of competence-based models in organizational and individual context; and (5) highlights challenges these models are likely to encounter in the future. To this end, a non-systematic literature review was carried out to summarize relevant published research studies and to define future research directions. Results show that further competence-based research should focus on generalizing the findings by looking at various groups of workers and industries, expanding the set of competences used in the analyses, using different definitions of key competences, and developing alternative models to assess their impact on performance. Such research would allow to better assess employees’ preparedness in terms of competence requirements, as well as to identify the most critical gaps and opportunities for the formal educational system and as part of on-the-job training.