The learning and development world constantly battles for legitimacy and funding, fueling a need to demonstrate the impact that training has on business goals and outcomes. To gain buy-in it becomes critical to create a competency framework aligned with the skills and competencies valued by your organization. It’s for this reason that the American Management Association (AMA) created the Total Professional Model, which is a competency framework that classifies the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed in the current and future business climate. This framework is a compass to identify learning solutions for individuals, groups, and organizations; and was a core driver in developing the AMA OnDemand Training Library. Organizations can easily align the Total Professional Model with their internal competency model or adopt it as their own.
AMA’s Total Professional Model consists of specific competencies based on the level of responsibility in the organization and one’s own career path; offering a framework for individual contributors, managers, and leaders.
- Individual Contributor: an individual who has no direct reports and manages their own workload
- Manager: an individual who manages people and/or processes
- Leader: an individual who manages and leads organizations
Within each are the four domains of professional competence: Professional Effectiveness, Relationship Management, Business Acumen, and Analytical Intelligence.
- Professional Effectiveness: the mastery of personal productivity and interpersonal skills, which enables individuals to manage themselves and collaborate with others to achieve goals.
- Relationship Management: the ability to establish and maintain professional relationships in order to lead and influence others to achieve strategic goals.
- Business Acumen: the understanding of business operations at the financial, functional, and strategic levels and the maintenance of a customer-focused approach.
- Analytical Intelligence: the application of systematic thinking, analysis, and data interpretation to create insights that support organizational objectives.
Competency frameworks can be utilized for meaningful learning solutions while also creating and curating content. Skill assessments at the individual and team level as well as 360-degree ratings that are aligned with AMA’s Total Professional Model assist solutions specialists to craft learning journeys that address the right skills at the appropriate career level. These considerations provide learners with exactly what they need, when they need it. This competency framework also enables solutions specialists to accurately and efficiently identify areas for course development and expeditiously curate content.
When creating the AMA OnDemand Training Library, AMA’s Total Professional Model was a guiding light. We created a comprehensive strategy to develop 60 new courses based on competencies throughout the individual contributor, manager, and leader levels, allowing a person to access the right content at the right level while thinking long-term.
A competency model like AMA’s Total Professional Model pays immediate and long-term dividends. It provides a method to easily classify the values and skills prized by an organization and orient learning outcomes toward them. Furthermore, it provides an efficient process of curating content and making it easily accessible. Paired with quantifiable metrics that demonstrate skill acquisition, this builds the case for learning and development’s place in the business and in the budget.
Learn more about mastering the skills that drive performance here
About the author: Dan Goeller: At the American Management Association Dan is a Learning Solutions Manager responsible for the Finance, Data Analysis, and Future Technologies portfolios of courses. He has also led the development and marketing of 60 new eLearning courses featured here on OpenSesame. A proud alum of the Business & Workplace Education program at New York University, Dan is an avid advocate of the benefits that Learning & Development can have on the individual, group, and organization.
