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Role Skills & Level Competencies

Branco uses two types of expectations to assess performance and growth — role skills and level competencies. Understanding the difference helps you interpret feedback and coach your team more effectively.

Role Skills​

  • Define expectations for technical abilities
  • Specific to a role and department (e.g. a Data Analyst has different skills than a Product Designer)
  • Used to assess day-to-day performance in the role

Role skills answer the question: "Is this person technically capable of doing their job at the expected level?"

Level Competencies​

  • Company-wide soft skills that apply to everyone
  • Consistent across departments — same competencies regardless of role
  • Reflect how someone shows up and works with others (communication, collaboration, leadership, etc.)

Level competencies answer the question: "Is this person operating at the right leadership and professional maturity level?"

Skills vs. Competencies — the key difference

Skills are role-specific and tied to seniority level. Competencies are company-wide and tied to leadership level. A Senior Engineer and a Senior Designer have different skill expectations but the same competency expectations.

How they're used​

Role skills and level competencies guide how feedback is requested, interpreted, and used to understand performance and growth in a consistent and fair way. Specifically, they:

  • Shape the feedback questions the Slack bot asks
  • Power the progress bars on each person's My Career page
  • Feed into AI-generated action plan suggestions on My Action Plan
  • Provide structure for performance and 9-box reports

What you need to do as a manager​

Nothing ongoing. All role skills and competencies are set up as part of onboarding by your admin team. No additional setup or maintenance is required from managers.

That said, it's worth understanding what skills and competencies are defined for your direct reports' roles so you can have informed coaching conversations. You can see them on each person's My Career page.

Review your team's expectations

Switch to a direct report's view using the "Yourself" dropdown and navigate to My Career. The skills and competencies listed there are what Branco is evaluating them against. If anything looks off, flag it with your admin.

Next: Growth, Careers, and 1:1s →