Board 58: Concept Map-based Aviation Competency Mapping and Training

Competency mapping is about identifying key skills required by an organization and/or a job so that they can be applied in important business operations such as job evaluation, training, and recruitment. For the organization, competency mapping serves two important purposes. On personal level, it analyzes individual’s SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats) and helps him compare with the success criteria (i.e., behavioral standards of performance excellence) to improve his career growth. On corporate level, competency mapping reinforces corporate strategy, culture, and vision, and provides a common framework to improve the effectiveness of training and professional development programs. In aviation industry, competency based workforce development has been implemented in the United Kingdom and Australia for pilot training, with the explicit objective of making employees globally competitive. Though the results are mixed, there is evidence that this approach appears to confer considerable advantages in specific areas for preparing pilots to operate aircraft. On the other hand, similar practice has not been established, or well designed for ground crew training. The safety department, for example, has a very urging demand to provide a common, organization-wide standard for different career levels that enable inspectors to smoothly adapt to new working environment and tasks. One of the main issues with the current competency focused training is that it tends to be slow and expensive because of the need for extensive interviews and observations. These activities are very time-consuming for those outstanding performers and analysts. In addition, there is not a standard competency mapping process that works in all situations. Each company needs to have a unique model, which adds to the developing cost and time. In this paper, we propose a competency mapping method based on conceptual maps for training in the aviation industry. The method builds on existing approaches and procedures, but incorporates new tools and analysis methods to assure the mapping to be concrete and comprehensive to provide effective guidance for ground crew training and skills appraisal.