The Importance of Proficiency Levels
Why You Need to Compare More Than Skills During Talent Selection
There are several factors to consider when looking to manage and utilize your employees’ skills. One of the most important elements is being able to understand and rank your talent’s proficiency levels. Learn more in our blog, Why You Need to Compare More Than Skills During Talent Selection.

Take your company to new heights
Whether your company is grappling with talent management for the first time, looking to modernize outdated tools, or searching for that extra competitive edge, our solution can meet you where you are.


Reveal the true nature of your collective talent
TalentGuard’s Workforce Skills Management platform unifies data, software and ecosystem to unlock complete visibility of skills, the intelligence to make data-led talent decisions and the ability to develop the highest potential in your workforce.
A talent strategy that grows with you. Select a bundle to book a demo!
Foundation
Foundation includes:
- Intelligent Role Studio
- Job and Skill Libraries
- Basic Reporting
- API
Basic
All the Foundation features plus:
- Talent Assessment
- Development Planning
- Reporting & Analytics
- 30+ languages
Core
All the Basic features plus:
- Career Pathing
- Certification Tracking
- 60+ languages
Pro
All the Core features plus:
- Succession Planning
- Performance Management
- 360 Feedback
- Advanced Reporting & Analytics
- 90+ languages
Your workforce is changing. Never be unprepared again.
Read our eBook
Learn more about skills management
[Webinar] 3 HR Trends to Implement Career Pathing for Employees
Join Linda Ginac for this webinar, where she will discuss three career pathing trends for HR and business leaders to consider as they plan their workforce development and employee engagement strategy for 2016. In this webinar, you will learn breakthrough areas of career pathing that are transforming the way people view their internal career journey […]
3 Benefits of Utilizing a Dynamic Job Architecture
Job architecture solutions enable an organization to build an inventory of their jobs, where they sit within the organization, and the key skills or competencies needed to be successful in each role. While the former version of a job architecture – which often existed in a spreadsheet – quickly became outdated as the organization evolved, […]
How Talent Assessments Lead to Skills Intelligence
Skills intelligence is more than a buzzword in business; it’s a core competency behind organizational success. Understanding the skills of your employees and how they relate to their current and potential roles gives you the data you need to strategize for the future of your company. The benefits extend beyond providing data to support the […]
How HR Can Best Support Employee Development
Investing in employee development has always been important, but it is becoming increasingly crucial in today’s rapidly changing business environment. As the world becomes more interconnected and technology advances at a rapid pace, companies are facing a growing talent deficit and are looking for ways to bridge the gap. Not only are companies hard pressed […]
Top HR Trends to Prepare for in 2023
The last two years have posed specific challenges for those who work in HR, mostly due to the pandemic. Businesses have had to learn how to operate successfully with fewer employees. Positions that were once fully staffed became vacant. Even the way organizations did business drastically shifted. And once the crisis was over, worker shortages […]
How Upskilling Can Close Your Succession Planning Gaps
Creating a solid talent infrastructure is one of the most important elements of any business. This entails having people in place to prepare for when there are inevitable changes within the organization. One way to prepare for such changes in talent is through succession planning. This strategy typically works to identify high-potential employees within the […]
The Benefits of Internal Talent Pools
In recent years, a well-executed talent management strategy has been regarded as an important foundation for achieving employee and business success. However, with the world of work experiencing such high-speed changes in recent years, businesses need to review their processes and account for the increased need to support rapid change. Being best prepared for the […]
The Costs of Avoiding a Skills Gap Analysis
Skill gaps inside the workforce are becoming increasingly prevalent due to technological disruption, the shortened half-life of skills, and talent shortages. A skills gap analysis can help bring clarity for companies facing this challenge to understand the current state of their talent and identify their gaps. Fosway Group reports that Skills Enablement is the number […]
Why Employee Engagement Matters to Your Customers
To keep companies growing and profitable, good customer service is extremely important. This helps ensure your ability to satisfy and retain the people who use your product or service. Research shows that having the best or most affordable product is not the main driver of keeping consumers loyal to your brand. In fact, 30% of […]
How to Prepare Your Managers for Upskilling
Upskilling and reskilling are powerful strategies to combat the war on talent that we have seen in recent years following mass automation, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the subsequent Great Resignation. Companies are becoming increasingly aware of their internal skill gaps and the great cost of leaving them unclosed. By 2030, the US is expected to […]
Why You Need to Compare More Than Skills During Talent Selection
Every organization is made up of people who have skills and people who are responsible for utilizing these skills effectively. It can be challenging for managers to understand how to best align employees during talent selections to work productively towards greater business goals. When managers select employees to perform various projects and assignments, there are […]
HR Automation: The Best Places to Start
AI and automation are topics that we are hearing about more than ever. They are applied to countless different processes and currently being adapted across all industries. HR is one of the many departments who is working to fully embrace the application of these methods due to the critical and dynamic nature of their work. […]
Why Employees Need Better Manager Feedback
Despite employees’ desires to be successful and productive at work, many of us have found ourselves leaving meetings with our manager confused and unsure of our next steps. Bad communication in the workplace is not just frustrating for employees, it can be extremely harmful to the overall health of the business. Research by Gartner shows […]
Benefits of Supporting Your Employees’ Career Aspirations
Do you have employees who crush deadlines, take on more responsibility and are knocking down their manager’s door for performance reviews? These attributes may describe your top performers and are most likely fueled by career aspirations. However, do you know what exact goals they are currently working towards? It may be an annual raise, or […]
Turning Exit Interviews Into Action
Despite voluntary turnover being a normal part of any workplace, it can still come as a surprise when employees turn in their resignation letter. Most companies seek to learn from these instances with an exit interview, but are the takeaways being acted on in a way that can actually reduce future turnover? The information that […]
The Journey of Employee Skill Growth
Every employee in your company possesses a certain number of skills and these skills are likely at different levels of proficiency. Your talent could also have additional skills that the business might not be aware of at all. To obtain an accurate picture of all of these skills, organizations must have a way to evaluate […]
Learning from Layoffs: Skills, Data and Alternatives to Consider
In May 2020, news of the Covid-19 pandemic broke across the world. We saw an inevitable spike in layoffs across many industries as companies scrambled to adjust. Two years later, we are still witnessing high numbers of layoffs with the largest spike since the beginning of the pandemic occurring very recently in May 2022. Companies […]
How to Solve Manufacturing’s 3 Biggest Skills-Based Challenges
While the chaos of the pandemic affected all industries, manufacturing may have been one of the most directly impacted. Extreme supply chain issues affected cost, timing, production, and labor in such a substantial way that many companies were scared they wouldn’t be able to recover. The expectation for the aftermath of the pandemic was that […]
Dynamic Skills: How to Prepare for Change
We are all familiar with how quickly our world is changing around us. Due to rapid technological advances and pandemic era business disruptions, one of the struggles this presents for the business world is the constantly changing and ever-expanding requirements of necessary skills. The pace of digital and industry advancement is demanding employees to learn […]
How to Overcome the 5 Internal Mobility Blockers
Filling open positions is hard. Finding someone with the experience and skills you need, and then adding a good attitude, punctuality, and a willingness to get along with others make it even more challenging. That’s why it seems like the obvious choice for companies with open jobs is to turn to their current employee base. After […]
How to Support Growth During The Great Resignation
New year, new normal? As we enter the new year, the past year ended with a record number of employees quitting their jobs. In November, 4.5 million US employees voluntarily left their companies, breaking the previous record in September of 4.2 million. As employees reconsider how they will spend their time on the job, there […]
The 7 Most Important Reasons For Implementing Succession Planning
When HR.com released its recent survey called The State of Internal Mobility, Success, and Career Development, a lot of eye-opening data was revealed regarding the various reasons it’s vital for organizations to have succession planning secured within their internal processes. With this in mind, we felt it was important to highlight these reasons so leaders like […]
Developing Internal Talent: What You Might Be Missing
Organizations across the United States and the world are suffering from a lack of talent as they continue to expand. Businesses are struggling to fill key roles that can help ensure the long-term growth of the company. The pandemic has changed the ways that employees see work and how employers are holding onto and finding […]
Keeping Up With Your Dynamic Workforce
As we move forward in this disruptive period in time it is clear that companies need to adapt with the changes or run the risk of being left behind. Many businesses have changed the way they work, are developing new policies for where their employees will work, and perhaps are pivoting their products and services […]
How To Retain Employees During High Turnover Times
Turnover is an issue that all companies experience. Holding on to and developing talent is a difficult task. Most companies generally have an idea of how many employees they can expect to lose in a given year. This number has recently exploded for companies of all sizes across most industries. COVID-19 has completely changed the […]
Upskilling Employees at Scale with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Training and Certifications
In the IT services industry, having employees with the right skills, knowledge, and experience is the difference between selling your service or not. As more companies migrate to the cloud, cloud computing is identified as one of the most in demand hard skills. However, in a recent survey, 90 percent of IT decision makers report […]
How to Create an Equitable Work Environment for Your Employees
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are ubiquitous and perhaps talked about more than ever before, but it is clear that there is much more work to be done. This topic is very complex, and organizations have tried to put the right policies and practice in place to create more equitable work environments, but some […]
How to Enable Rapid Workforce Redeployment
Employees are arguably the most important factor of an organization’s ability to compete in this present moment but also in the long term. An organization’s talent drives innovation and creates value. Turnover can cause drastic effects throughout an organization, such as the loss of company knowledge, which alone can pile on the costs from recruiting […]
Performance Management Sample Comments
Below are examples of comments that would support individual ratings. These are generic in nature and examples only. Performance comments should be tailored to the individual employee and be based on the employee’s individual performance expectations. ANALYTICAL THINKING – The quality and quantity of work produced by the employee. Poor: • Has made frequent errors that […]
Why Job Roles Matter
For most organizations, getting your existing employees to fit into a specific role can be a tough task, especially when the employee isn’t happy with their current position. It’s often the result assigning someone based on skills rather than the job itself. Typically, organizations looking to find someone for a position tend to look for […]
Additional information
What does it mean to be proficient? And do your employees consider themselves proficient? In other words, have they mastered languages such as Microsoft Excel? Or can they perform only the most basic functions? As a manager of people, you need to know exactly what skills your applicants and employees possess. You must know their levels of proficiency in education — whether they have a bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, or high school diploma. You must know their levels of proficiency in job competency: Are they coming in with years of experience, or are they functioning at an intermediate skill level?
Proficiency levels matter, and it’s not enough to take an applicant’s word regarding how much they know. You must be able to measure factors such as language fluency levels and job knowledge without assuming levels of proficiency. Resumes can lie, after all. And placing the wrong person in a pivotal role not only hurts the company, it’s not doing the employee any favors, either. This is why every organization needs a way to test and measure the proficiency levels of their workforce.
Levels of Proficiency
So, what is professional working proficiency, and what are the levels of skills proficiency? According to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, there are eleven levels of proficiency that range from novice to distinguished. They include:
- Novice Low
- Novice Mid
- Novice High
- Intermediate Low
- Intermediate Mid
- Intermediate High
- Advanced Low
- Advanced Mid
- Advanced High
Level 10 is Superior. Level 11 is Distinguished. Where does each member of your workforce fall on this chart? You need education and experience data to find out. You need software that can easily measure skills proficiency levels. Only then can you be certain you’ve correctly placed the employees with the most proficient skills, meaning you’ve positioned the most highly qualified people into the most important roles.
Proficiency Level Examples
Using language proficiency as an example, it’s easy to see why proficiency matters. Proficiency level examples range from no proficiency to native or bilingual speaker. The scale begins with no proficiency. This is an applicant who has no knowledge or training in the language your organization uses. They may hold a doctoral degree from a foreign university, but they have no experience at all with your language. This applicant could be a wonderful asset to your organization, but they’ll need language training or an interpreter to function at their highest level.
Next is elementary proficiency. According to the elementary proficiency meaning, this applicant has only the most basic understanding of the language. They have knowledge of the basic mechanics, but are unable to grasp nuances in the spoken or written word.
Applicants or employees with limited working proficiency are more adept at grasping the unwritten rules of the language. According to the limited working proficiency meaning, they may still have difficulty understanding metaphors or other forms of figurative language, but they know enough to function well at their job.
Someone with full professional proficiency is next to a native speaker. According to professional working proficiency meaning, this applicant or employee has advanced language skills and understands most of the rules this includes. They can use literal or figurative language equally well. As an employer, you want to fill vital positions with applicants who have at least full professional proficiency, meaning they have superior skills at communication.
At the top of the chart is the native or bilingual speaker. This team member has been immersed in the language for most of their life, or they’ve taken enough classes to place them within the realm of native speaker.
Using the levels of language proficiency as examples, it becomes easier to see why proficiency levels for skills matter, whether those skills are in communication, delegation, mastery of computer languages, or management.
Competancy Level Examples
So, are competencies and skills interchangeable? Actually, they’re not, though many people view them as one and the same. While a skill is a learned ability that helps you better perform your job, such as the ability to program a computer or the ability to perform an interview, a competency is what is often called a “soft skill.” Problem-solving and critical thinking are competencies that people use every day in the performance of their jobs. There are different levels of competence, just as there are levels of proficiency.
What Are the Five Levels of Competency?
- Fundamental Awareness
- Novice Level
- Intermediate Level
- Advanced Level
- Expert Level
Competency levels examples are represented by the following:
A fundamental awareness includes only the most basic knowledge. Employees at the novice level may have very limited experience. Intermediate competency level usually describes someone who has practical experience, while advanced competency refers to someone with experience who can apply theories. Someone with expert-level competency is usually considered to be a recognized authority. It’s important to know where your employees fall on competency proficiency levels. These competency proficiency level descriptors may be helpful, but they’re no substitute for an efficient software program that measures specific levels of competency in education, business, management, or other industries.
Proficiency Levels Software
Ideally, it’s necessary to have strong knowledge of who, among your employees, are your key players. By utilizing proficiency levels software that features a strong skill level scale, resumes are easier to decipher. It becomes much easier to see, at a glance, who has the best qualifications for key roles. And among your established workforce, a software program that includes a competency dictionary with proficiency levels PDF, makes it easier to find internally promotable employees.
Until recent advancements in human resource software, defining proficiency levels in key roles such as computer operation, quality control, accounting, purchasing, receiving, and similar positions has relied upon human contribution, which is fallible. Now, it’s possible, at a glance, to see which employees have the necessary skills to move your company forward and which ones may benefit from additional training.
Simply because an employee has knowledge of a skill does not mean they have the ability to use it to its full potential. Through HR software programs that focus on skill measurement and skill development, now you’ll have the information needed to help every member of your workforce improve marketability and job performance, two markers of a healthy, rewarding career trajectory.