Invest in the right technology, and you’ll be able to gain deeper insights into your employees. We want to make your management processes as efficient and helpful as possible. When you begin investing in the right technology and resource systems, you gain insights into improving your organization. Our competency management systems will help you identify future leaders within your agency. Together, we’ll be certain that your people have the skills and competencies for success.
PowerTrain’s competency management solutions consist of organized approaches to ensuring that organizations have the talent needed to support is mission. We work closely with our clients, helping them define skills, wants, and needs, and align them to specific position series. This process allows agencies to forecast needs, determine training goals, and measure progress toward those goals.
Over the years, PowerTrain has provided competency support to a slew of government organizations, including the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and most recently, the Joint Special Operations Medical Training Center (JSOMTC).
Competency management for OPM
Through OPM’s ongoing workforce planning activities, the agency realized that it was looking at critical shortages for human resource professionals, background investigators, and HR legal experts. After clarifying the knowledge, skills, and abilities of these positions, the agency sought a solution that would allow employees across the agency to assess their current skills against these critical agency needs.
PowerTrain developed the Career Map module to work in conjunction with the software-as-a-service learning management solution developed for the employees of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) called the Learning Connection. This system allows OPM to:
- Identify job series that are a critical need for the agency
- Create questionnaires that allow employees to assess their skills against the required knowledge, skills, and abilities needed for the critically needed positions
- Create individual development plans that support employees, and the career counselors develop the knowledge, skills, and abilities through web-based instruction, instructor-led training, external training, and mentored on-the-job experiences.
Competency management for USCIS
The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) was in the process of adding thousands of new immigration officers to its ranks in order to address the backlog of applications for citizenship. The agency was hiring new immigration officer candidates on the condition that candidates successfully completed Immigration Officer Basic Training. The agency wanted to ensure that its curriculum was aligned with immigration officer competencies. Our solution? Develop an online survey that allows stakeholders to identify all of the competencies needed for the immigration officer training.
Competencies were defined, organized, and clarified. PowerTrain observed the delivery of the entire Basic Training course, documenting how competencies were addressed in the training. PowerTrain then analyzed each test item and provided documentation of where each test item’s information was addressed in lectures and course materials. We assisted the agency in closing gaps and ensured the content and construct validity of each test item.
With PowerTrain, USCIS created a system to ensure terminal and enabling learning objectives are effectively covered during the training, and continues to use this process to validate test items. This same rigor has been applied to other USCIS academy courses and was the catalyst for revitalizing several academy training programs.
