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In my role as Opencast’s Learning and Development Business Partner, I’ve been diving headfirst into one of our most ambitious people development projects to date – creating tailored technical competency frameworks for people who work in teams as part of our company’s core functions.
Competency frameworks set out the attributes, skills and knowledge for job roles in a business – and they allow the business and its people to share a common understanding of expected skills and behaviours for job roles, and what ‘excellent’ looks like.
With over 20 distinct frameworks to develop at Opencast – from people working in teams across people and finance, as well as in technology and client teams – the competency frameworks project is proving as challenging as it is rewarding.
The project has required whole new levels of creativity, teamwork and openness to explore innovative solutions. This is exactly what has led me to experiment with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to accelerate and transform our approach.
Many other organisations are known to be exploring the value-add of AI for their people processes. At Opencast we’ve been looking at how we can use the power of AI in very specific ways to meet our need to improve and optimise our competency framework processes.
When developing these frameworks, we knew they had to be uniquely ‘Opencast’ – accessible, aspirational, and growth oriented.
Each framework needs to reflect the unique technical requirements of our teams, offer measurable growth pathways, and provide clear development guidance. I started by researching best practice, aligning holistic themes to professional bodies and collaborating with subject matter experts (SMEs) across functions to define key competencies.
But, with each iteration, it was clear that this manual process was not only time-consuming but also a significant drain on stakeholder resources.
Enter GenAI - a tool that I initially approached with some caution. Was it ‘cheating’? And could it really help us tackle the nuanced demands of competency framework design? I wasn’t looking for AI to replace the insights and expertise of our SMEs, but rather to augment our efforts effectively and efficiently.
Partnering with Opencast Senior Solutions Architect Vipul Mogre, we explored together how AI might help us to streamline the framework development process. The collaboration with Vipul introduced me to the concept of ‘prompt engineering’ for large-language models (LLMs), and I quickly saw the potential of AI to speed up our work while preserving the human element.
Building a competency AI: a unique framework Using a specific competency-focused LLM, Vipul and I began honing prompts to teach the AI about Opencast’s story, structure, organisational values, tone of voice and framework needs.
I trained the AI model in the knowledge, methods, and tools (KMT) format, which is essential for each framework. By iterating the frameworks through the AI, I could then generate drafts that were more aligned with our organisational language, values and technical requirements with each round of feedback.
Working with subject matter experts (SMEs), we produced input documents specifying key themes, focus areas and KMT distinctions. The AI then generated the output - comprehensive frameworks levelled for professional growth, ready to be reviewed and finalised by the functional SME.
The journey so far has highlighted the importance of combining human expertise with technology, having seen firsthand how prompt engineering can direct AI to deliver value in people development projects – saving time, while deepening the quality of work.
The more I refined my approach, the clearer it became that AI, when guided effectively and done in a safe and ethical way, could help us achieve a balance between efficiency and depth.
Our approach to using generative AI in this project nicely aligns with Gartner’s concept of the 'zone of deep productivity' – where AI can drive the most value by enhancing complex, expertise-driven work.
By strategically deploying AI to build our competency frameworks, we saved time and amplified the expertise of our stakeholders, all while creating tailored, growth-focused resources. Nate Suda, Gartner’s Senior Director and an expert on generative AI, concluded that “GenAI is not just a technological shift; it's a human-centric transformation that redefines how we achieve productivity.”
This blend of human insight and AI is redefining productivity in people development, and I’m eager to explore its potential further by piloting new GenAI innovations that will help turn bold ideas like personalised content and dynamic resources into transformative realities at Opencast.
We are still very much learning in this space, but we’d be happy to share our thinking on what we’ve being doing so far so. If you’re working to harness AI for people processes in your own organisation, we’d love to hear from you. Feel free to drop me a line and I’ll be in touch.
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