Assessing Capability for Lasting Change in the Ministries of Education

Leveraging expertise from across the organisation, Etio (formerly Tribal Education Services) collaborated with a prominent GCC Ministry of Education to support them in their restructuring decision making with evidence-based assessment of employees across capabilities important to the future strategy of the Ministry.

In 2021, Etio had the privilege of partnering with a GCC Ministry as part of their change programme. Etio collaborated with Ministry stakeholders to implement the workforce development strategy through an assessment of the capability of 400 Ministry employees.

As part of the Ministry restructuring, Management wanted to assess how competent selected Ministry employees were in terms of their fit for new policy and leadership roles. The focus of the change in the Ministry was to move employees away from being generalist to being more focused on specific policy areas and therefore needed to better understand their employees experience, core analytical skills and understanding of education and policy.

The Etio team utilised their knowledge and experience to design an assessment programme that would provide the Ministry with an evidence based view on the selected employees’ fit for specific job roles and overall competencies. The diverse Etio team brought together expertise in assessment, education workforce development, policy and education leadership to design a range of assessment tools that allowed candidates to be fairly assessed and allow their strengths to be clearly identified.

To ensure an agreed understanding of what specific competencies and different levels look like, the Etio team worked in partnership with the Ministry to started by designing a competency framework that outlined the key skill and knowledge areas that were required to be assessed. For each skills and knowledge a descriptor statement was written to articulate the application of skill and knowledge at different levels within the hierarchy. This competency framework formed the basis of the assessment design the subsequent professional development recommendations.

The assessment programme administered to each employee included: a leadership competency assessment, structured knowledge-based interviews, self-reflection assessment and a change survey. These different assessments provided different insights that were integrated and aligned to the competency framework by Etio's expert assessor who created an individual report for each employee assessed, as well as an overall report commenting on key skills and knowledge areas for consideration.

As a key part of the collaboration, the Ministry’s expertise shadowed Etio to ensure sustainability of the use of the competency framework and assessments after the project ended. The competency framework was a critical tool in communicating the specific areas of strengths and weaknesses and ensuring an agreed understanding. The Ministry shared the competency framework with the employees to help them interpret and understand the results of the assessments. The recommendations for professional development based on the assessments were added to the following years’ training plans.

The final outcome was the Ministry having a much clearer understanding of both individual and collective competencies among employees and helped to inform important decisions for the new organisational structure and job roles.