To be successful, companies will have business objectives and contractual commitments to meet and
usually carry out a robust recruitment processes to ensure that they employ the right person with the
correct qualification and skills.

However, are qualifications and experience enough to confirm that the employees are working within the Standards, Policies and Procedures to meet the business objectives?

The only way we can make sure the company’s workforce are maintaining their skills to the correct and current legislation and procedures is to develop and maintain a Competence Management System.

There are numerous reasons for having a Competence programme such as:

• Satisfy legal and regulatory requirements
• Meet the business objectives for the organisation
• Enable the organisation to meet contractual commitments
• Workforce development
• Reduce competence-related incidents
• Right people, right skill, right job

It is not only a requirement to have the right person for the role, working to the correct and current standards and procedures but do they have the evidence to prove this?

Having a Competence Management System will ensure that employees are assessed in their role to confirm they are meeting the Skill and Knowledge requirements to carry out their tasks in line with achieving business operational excellence. Over time an employee might experience skill fade and/or other internal and external changes such as: legislation, company policy or an equipment upgrade.

How do we make sure that employees are meeting these changes to maintain their current level of competence?

This is carried out through Quality Assurance and is one of the roles of the Internal Verifer (IV). The IV will ensure compliance with assessment related processes and procedures

to confirm that employees are working consistently and objectively to in-house standards.

A Lead Verifier within an organisation will hold regular company standards meetings to make sure the Competence Management System is fit for purpose. These meetings will ensure all company IVs, Assessors and Trainers are being fair and consistent with all employees in meeting their job requirements in line with business operational requirements.

A Departmental IV will conduct ad hoc standardisation meetings when there are any changes. The IV therefore should be pro-active and ensure that all employees involved in the change will be trained and accordingly assessed. This will confirm that the company meets the requirements that will help achieve
all business objectives and/or any other contractual requirement which could include for example in supporting a reduction in work related accidents.