Competency Frameworks:
Are They Keeping You in Business or Just Keeping You Busy?
Our blog, “Competency Frameworks: Are They Keeping You in Business or Just Keeping You Busy?” is now also available as a podcast.
Hear Josh Harrop explain why most competency programmes collapse under their own weight — and what the BP Texas City disaster teaches us about having the right people, with the right skills, in the right place at the right time.
This podcast episode was created with the support of Google NotebookLM.
Picture yourself at the BP Texas City refinery. March 2005.
Your team is starting up an isomerisation unit. It’s a non-routine, high-risk operation — but you’ve done it before. It’s become familiar. Today, however, the board operator arrives late to the control room. A key unit supervisor leaves early due to a family issue. Shift handover is rushed. Authorities and process safety critical information are transferred as clearly as the moment allows — which is not very clearly at all.
What follows is one of the worst industrial disasters in US history. Fifteen colleagues die. More than 170 are injured. The plant is destroyed. The company faces USD 1.5 billion in damages and a reputational reckoning that will take years to recover from.
The Chemical Safety Board’s investigation produced many lessons for industry. One of them is clear: during a safety-critical startup, BP had not ensured effective supervision, adequate experience, robust training, and disciplined shift communication at the right time. The people managing the startup were operating in conditions shaped by weak handover, inadequate training for abnormal situations, insufficient experienced supervisory oversight, and training systems that did not effectively verify operator knowledge and qualifications for high-risk tasks.
| A competency framework that cannot guarantee the right person is competent, present and capable at the moment of maximum risk is not a framework. It is a filing exercise. |
The Competency Balloon Problem
Most organisations know they need a competency framework. Many have one. The question is whether it is doing the right work. The list of critical positions can easily balloon — as can the list of required skills. When this happens, the exercise becomes self-defeating. When everything is critical, nothing is.
Figure 1: The competency balloon problem vs. the SnSD approach — scoped by risk, closed by coaching.
An over-scoped competency framework consumes enormous resources and organisational ‘capital’ — credibility with the workforce and with leadership. When people perceive a competency programme as an administrative burden disconnected from how work is actually done, compliance becomes performative. Assessments get ticked rather than genuinely evaluated. Gaps persist. The framework becomes a comfort blanket rather than a control.
The SnSD Approach: A Five-Step Process Built on What Matters
SnSD’s approach to competency management begins with a fundamental discipline: define before you assess, and scope before you define. Our five-step process is structured to ensure that effort concentrates where it produces real risk reduction.
Figure 2: SnSD Five-Step HSE Competency Management Process
The process is structured around four critical population groups — each requiring a distinct competency profile, a distinct level of assessment rigour, and a distinct closure approach:
Figure 3: SnSD Four Critical Population Groups for HSE Competency Management
This segmentation prevents the two most common failure modes: the under-scoped framework that misses critical roles entirely, and the over-scoped framework that treats every role as equally critical and collapses under its own weight. By defining boundary conditions clearly before identification begins, SnSD ensures the resulting competency matrix reflects actual risk rather than organisational anxiety.
| It’s not about how many people are in the framework. It’s about whether the people who can materially influence a safety outcome are demonstrably competent to do so. |
Why Training Alone Is Not Enough
Even a well-scoped competency framework will fail to deliver safety outcomes if gaps are closed through classroom training alone. The evidence from learning science is unambiguous.
Table 1: Delivery Method vs. Information Retention Rate. Source: National Training Laboratories of Bethel, Maine.
A lecture retains 5% of the information delivered. Supervision and coaching retains 90%. Yet the default competency gap closure mechanism in most organisations is some combination of classroom sessions, e-learning modules and knowledge assessments. These confirm exposure. They do not confirm competence.
This is the foundation of SnSD’s Shining Stars program — structured coaching-led development pathways designed to close competency gaps at the frontline and middle management levels respectively, through doing and teaching rather than listening and testing.
Shining Stars: Breaking Through the Clay Layer
The single most common point of failure in safety culture transformation is mid-level management — what organisational change practitioners call the ‘clay layer.’ Senior leadership commits. Frontline workers respond. The layer in between absorbs the initiative and prevents it from reaching the people who need to feel it most.
SnSD’s Shining Stars programme is specifically designed to address this. Before engaging frontline supervisors, we invest in making mid-level managers the active carriers of safety culture change — not passive recipients of communications from above.
Figure 4: Shining Stars programme reach — illustrative programme outcomes from SnSD client deployment.
Shining Stars is built within Kotter’s 8-Step Change Model[1], aligning the development programme to a structured change management architecture. Mid-level leaders become change agents — not just trained individuals, but active champions of the ‘Paper to People’ shift throughout their teams.
Rising Stars: Frontline Competency Through Bronze, Silver and Gold
Where Shining Stars addresses the clay layer, Rising Stars addresses the frontline. It is a structured peer-coaching programme for Level 3 supervisors — the people directly responsible for managing safety-critical work at the point of execution.
The programme operates on a tiered Bronze–Silver–Gold progression, grounded in the learning science principle that competence is only real when it can be taught to others. The progression moves from Know to Do to Teach — and each tier requires verified demonstration, not self-assessment.
Figure 5: Rising Stars Programme — Bronze, Silver and Gold competency tiers with verification requirements.
What makes the Rising Stars programme distinctive is its integration with real work. This is not a training course with a certificate at the end. It is a structured overlay on day-to-day operations — the competency criteria are expressed as observed behaviours in actual field situations. A Gold Rising Star is not someone who passed an exam. They are someone who has demonstrably coached others through permit-to-work, MOC, shift handover, and process safety field observations — and been verified doing so.
What a Gold Rising Star Looks Like in Practice
To make this concrete: here is what a typical working day looks like for a Gold Rising Star on an operating refinery. This is not an exceptional day. It is an ordinary one.
Figure 6: A Day in the Life of a Gold Rising Star — competency embedded in daily operations, not in a classroom.
This is what competency looks like when it is genuinely embedded. Not a score on an assessment. Not a training record in an LMS. A supervisor, on a normal working day, actively coaching their team on the behaviours that prevent major accidents.
Rising Stars will become ‘the way we do things around here.’ That is the goal — not certification, but culture.
Making It Stick: Integration into HR and Governance
Competency programmes that exist outside of organisational systems do not survive leadership changes, restructures or operational pressure. SnSD designs for sustainability from the outset. The Rising Stars and Shining Stars programmes are structured to integrate with existing HR systems across the full talent lifecycle: recruitment screening, onboarding, performance management, career and succession planning, and recognition frameworks.
Gold Rising Stars earn CPD points, level-based certificates, and formal recognition through townhall ceremonies. Their status is recorded in operational systems and linked to career progression decisions. Governance is maintained through an HSE Steering Committee for strategic direction and a Gold Rising Stars Community of Practice for ongoing programme health. Programme assurance is embedded into the HSE audit cycle.
The sustainability design reflects a deliberate philosophy: if the competency programme cannot survive without SnSD’s active involvement, it has not succeeded. The measure of success is a client organisation that owns, runs and continuously improves its own competency system — with Rising Stars and Shining Stars as a self-sustaining internal capability, not an externally dependent programme.
Back to Texas City
The fifteen people who died at Texas City in 2005 were not let down by absent procedures or missing equipment. They were let down by a system that could not verify whether the right people, with the right competencies, were in the right place at the right time. That failure was not visible until it was catastrophic.
A well-designed competency framework makes that failure visible before it becomes a tragedy. It defines who is truly critical, verifies that they are genuinely competent, and builds the coaching culture that sustains that competence under pressure — on a Tuesday morning in a rushed shift handover, when a board operator is late and a supervisor has left early.
| How confident are you that the people managing your highest-risk operations right now are genuinely competent — not just trained? If the answer requires checking a completion report rather than observing the field, that gap is worth exploring. |
References
[1] Kotter, J.P. (1996). Leading Change. Harvard Business School Press. The 8-Step Process for Leading Change is a registered model of Kotter Inc.
[2] U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) — Investigation Report: BP Texas City Refinery Explosion and Fire, March 2005 (Report No. 2005-04-I-TX).
[3] Baker Panel Report — The Report of the BP U.S. Refineries Independent Safety Review Panel (January 2007).
[4] National Training Laboratories of Bethel, Maine — Learning Pyramid / Retention Rates by Instructional Method.
[5] IOGP Report 6.36 — Safety Culture in the Oil and Gas Industry (2013).
[6] Energy Institute — High-level Framework for Process Safety Management (2010).
