Analysing roles, competencies
and skills
Role analysis is a fundamental HR process. It provides the information needed to
produce role profiles and for use in recruitment, learning and development, perfor-
mance management and job evaluation. For reasons given below, the terms ‘role
analysis’ and ‘role profile’ are rapidly replacing the terms ‘job analysis’ and ‘job
description’. However, role analysis uses basically the same techniques as job
analysis and many features of role profiles are found in more traditional job descrip-
tions. Job analysis is also still used to provide the data for job evaluation, as explained
in Chapter 44.
In this chapter, role analysis is covered first and the chapter continues with descrip-
tions of the associated techniques of competency and skills analysis.
ROLE ANALYSIS
Role analysis defined
Role analysis is the process of finding out what people are expected to achieve when
carrying out their work and the competencies and skills they need to meet these
expectations.
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