~ Competency Watch™ Provides Evidence-Based Information to Companies Looking to Develop Core Competencies in Employees and Improve Organizational Performance~

IPSWICH, Mass. — February 10, 2011 — Corporate learning professionals have a new way to teach key professional competencies within their organizations.. Competency Watch™ from EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) is a new monitoring service that provides high-end, evidence-based information for companies to help employees at all levels develop core competencies—capabilities, skills, proficiencies, expertise and experience that add value to the company.

Leveraging competencies in employees, managers, and executives is essential to enhance individual effectiveness and develop leaders as well as to improve overall organizational performance. Competency Watch includes critical information regarding these professional competencies, information that is monitored and synthesized for rapid access and updated as new information becomes available. Competency Watch provides organizations with quick, concise, unbiased summaries that match their core competencies and helps employees build the skills and knowledge they need to help the company gain a competitive advantage.
Competency Watch includes more than 200 evidence-based reports covering all aspects of professional “soft skills” including:

• business strategy
• communications
• team building
• planning
• innovation
• entrepreneurship
• human resource management
• social responsibility
• finance
• diversity

Each report provides a definition and a summary pertaining to the competency as well as an investigation of how the competency applies to various individuals within the organization. A case study is also provided highlighting the real-life utility of each competency. Senior Director of Market Development for EBSCO Publishing Joe Tragert says this new resource both introduces essential soft skills and helps employees incorporate what they’ve learned. “Competency Watch is designed to accelerate the learning process by providing that baseline understanding of core soft skills. Once the learner has a basic grasp of the competency, it is much easier for them to apply the concepts to their daily job in the organization.”

Competency Watch has adapted EBSCO’s core evidence-based methodology to areas of interest to corporate executives. The evidence-based approach identifies, selects and systematically evaluates pertinent information and creates a synthesis of the best available evidence. EBSCO’s experience with evidence-based content includes the point-of-care resources it provides to hospitals and other medical institutions including the clinical decision support resource DynaMed™. EBSCO offers similar executive decision-support tools based on proprietary, evidence-based content with Corporate Learning Watch™, Food Industry Watch™ and Sustainability Watch™.

Competency Watch may be integrated into corporate portals and Intranets. The EBSCOhost® Integration Toolkit allows EBSCO’s content to be incorporated into an organization’s workflow—providing seamless access to premium content.

About EBSCO Publishing
EBSCO Publishing is the world’s premier database aggregator serving the content needs of corporations, associations and organizations of all types. EBSCO offers a suite of more than 300 full-text and secondary research databases providing content from tens of thousands of full-text journals, magazines, books, monographs, reports and various other publication types from renowned publishers. Databases provide information for areas ranging from research & development and corporate learning to departmental and industry-specific topics. EBSCO’s product lines include proprietary databases such as Business Source® Corporate, Business Book Summaries™, Learning Centers™, Business Basics™, Academic Search® R&D, Nonprofit Organization Reference Center™, and Health Library™ as well as dozens of leading licensed databases. Databases are powered by EBSCOhost®, the most-used for-fee electronic resource in libraries around the world, and may be integrated into corporate intranets, portals and learning management systems. For more information, visit the EBSCO Publishing Web site at: www.ebscohost.com, or contact: information@ebscohost.com.

EBSCO Publishing is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the United States.
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For more information, please contact:
Kathleen McEvoy
Public Relations Manager
(800) 653-2726 ext. 2594
kmcevoy@ebscohost.com