Competence in Support of ISO 9001 – Lecture 10
Lecture summary:
- The company has to decide what particular competencies are needed to perform his/her job correctly
- Once you determine the competence, you will see if and what training is needs to be provided
- Keep the evidence
In a quality management system, competence represents appropriate qualifications, skill set, and knowledge with the goals of achieving the intended results. According to an ISO 9001 standard, each employee in your company should be competent to do their job, and which is practically a must, to have the evidence of their competence. But the standard is letting you define the competence for each job role.
You should define the need for competencies systematically that can fulfill these goals and objectives such as strategy and the processes that operate the QMS. You also should plan training and qualifying to enhance the achievement of these goals and objectives.
Necessity of competence
Competence and adequate skills include hiring or contracting competent persons, reassigning employees, training, education, qualification, mentoring, coaching, and experience. So you have to make a decision about what particular competencies every employee must have to perform his/her job correctly and effectively.
One of the essential steps in developing competence is to establish an appropriate and effective training and certification process. Also, not to be neglected is to have a properly defined job description that will help with guiding this process.
The training and job description have to give at least a basic understanding of what is required to perform certain tasks and how the employee qualifies for the job.
Documenting and Measuring Competence
So, the ISO 9001 standard does not require to document your employee's competence, or training, or awareness process. But since their competency is crucial for your successfully produced product and/or service conformance, you will probably take into consideration to implement the training and certification process.
Another required evaluation of the performance, effectiveness, and competence is the periodical assessment of employees. These evaluations will help you to position the employees according to their qualifications and training objectives. Afterward, you will be able to properly assess the results and to determine whether it requires further measures. Later on, you can make them be presented as a checklist, or a form, with qualitative or quantitative assessments.
But do not forget: The most important part of the evaluation is whether the training has achieved its goal.
Things that you have to documents are things like training needs, training, and certification plan. Regards documented information - a good way to manage it is to maintain a designated file for each employee with relevant quality records. Our advice to you is to monitor how your human resources sector manages it—maybe they are carrying out most of the documentation already.
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