Accelerating career growth through competency frameworks

About Everbridge

Everbridge empowers enterprises and government organizations to anticipate, mitigate, respond to, and recover stronger from critical events. Everbridge digitizes organizational resilience by combining intelligent automation with the industry’s most comprehensive risk data to Keep People Safe and Organizations Running™.

The Challenge

The people leaders at Everbridge were committed to developing the company’s employees, but a lack of a centralized approach and unified metrics was preventing them from giving employees consistent development and career-growth opportunities. Employee feedback via pulse surveys and exit interviews confirmed that this was an issue. Employees wanted the company to answer three key questions:

• What career opportunities are available for me?
• What do I need to work on to get there?
• How can I develop the identified area?

Jessie Conley, Senior Learning & Development Specialist at Everbridge, knew where the organization had to go, and she knew competencies could help her bring the vision to life by providing clear expectations and building individual development plans.

“Even before I started at Everbridge, the HR and leadership teams knew that developing a competency framework was the first step to get the ball rolling,” she said. “When I was brought in, the first step was setting up a competency framework.”

The Solution

Everbridge chose HRSG as their partner in developing a competency framework they could use to drive career development because they wanted to go deeper than an off-the-shelf competency solution.

“We knew HRSG could provide us with clear direction and guidance for phase one of the project, enabling us to take their approach and scale it across the organization in an efficient manner,” said Conley. “We love that HRSG involved our key stakeholders with surveys to determine what was most important to them.”

Everbridge chose to build competency profiles for their leadership and technology roles as a pilot project. While organizations typically start building competency profiles for more straightforward functions, Conley wanted to take a different approach. To get optimal value from HRSG, she wanted to start with the most complex and challenging functions.

“It is about looking at what you need to do and tackling the hardest things first,” she explained. “Do the hard things first, and the rest is easy.”

The Result

Everbridge is now almost 90% of the way through the process of implementing competency frameworks for its many departments across the organization, and leaders are already using the competency profiles to improve the way they support their reports.
“People leaders have felt more empowered in having something to discuss with and provide to their employees, and employees feel they have a more clear direction on WHAT they can develop,” said Conley.

“Having a competency with a definition, the different proficiency levels, and the behaviors for each level is perfect. It’s enough information and detail for employees to have clear expectations for their development, while also being easily personalized across departments and employees with different job functions.”

Key Learnings

In addition to developing functional competency profiles for some of the organization’s most critical roles, Conley emerged with valuable insight into the process of building and deploying competency profiles:

• Understand that done is better than perfect. Deploy quickly and then refine.
• Go into the process knowing that there are going to be multiple iterations.
• Think about the impact on people. Focus on articulating what employees will get out of it.