DACUM
DACUM (Developing A Curriculum)
What is DACUM?
- Break a job down into tasks in a workshop with top performers
- Duty → Task → importance, difficulty, and frequency ratings
- Build training courses from the job, not from gut feeling
Once you have run DACUM properly, even the way training planning meetings sound changes. A suggestion like ‘I hear negotiation courses are trending’ becomes ‘chairing technical review meetings at the proposal stage rates 4.6 for difficulty, and we have no training for it.’ The real payoff of this technique is that the responsibility for proving a training need shifts from HR to the business panelists. Because the top performers whose names are on the chart become the program’s sponsors, post-launch attendance and business-unit buy-in improve along with it.
In a standard workshop, one facilitator and one recorder lead a panel of 8–12 people for two days, and the output is a single-page chart with 8–12 duties, 6–12 tasks per duty, and 60–120 tasks in total. Each task is then rated 1–5 on importance, difficulty, and frequency, and tasks scoring high on all three move to the top of the priority list. It is easily confused with competency modeling, but a competency model addresses 'how people behave,' while DACUM addresses 'what people produce.' The two are therefore complements, not substitutes; in practice, DACUM chart tasks are mapped to NCS competency units and reused as the backbone of in-house certifications and job descriptions.
The most common failure is mistaking the day the chart is delivered for the project end date. A task list is raw material, not a curriculum. Translating tasks into learning objectives and grouping them into modules takes another 2–3 weeks, longer than the workshop itself. Skip this step and the chart goes into a filing cabinet while the training system copies last year’s. Panel composition also often goes wrong. Seat whoever has time, or team leads, instead of busy top performers, and you get a textbook-style job description instead of the real, hands-on work. Announcing that workshop results will be used as performance criteria is just as fatal. Participants start inflating or hiding their work, so you need to make clear in the first 30 minutes that the chart is for training design, not for evaluating people.
Kyungtae KimHR expert · Organizational culture and HR strategy consultant
John KimAuthor of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum ConsultingDeveloped in the late 1960s in a Canadian workforce training program, it was systematized and spread through Ohio State University’s vocational education center. It was introduced in Korea through the vocational training field in the 1990s and used as a foundational technique for developing the NCS.
Consider a hypothetical case: Company A, an industrial-parts manufacturer with 480 employees and KRW 120 billion (≈ US$89,780,000) in annual revenue. It had 62 salespeople, yet only 3 of its 27 in-house training courses were sales-specific, and a new salesperson took 14 months on average to handle a client alone. The talent development team ran a six-week DACUM workshop.
- Kim, a manager on the talent development team, picked the 10 sales reps with the highest goal attainment over the past three years as panelists and split the 4 team leaders off into a separate validation session. The argument that won people over was, "If you’re in the room, the junior staff will clam up."
- On the morning of day 1, the facilitator asked panelists to "describe, using verbs, what you actually did yesterday," and 9 duty cards went up on the wall. They spent two hours debating where 'quote rework' belonged and finally filed it under the 'proposal' duty.
- Over two days the panel produced 87 task cards. One card from Park, a 10-year veteran manager, noting that "we review design change requests every week, yet it’s in no job description," drew out 11 more missing tasks.
- The panel rated all 87 tasks from 1 to 5 on importance, difficulty, and frequency. The 14 tasks averaging 4.0 or higher across the three ratings made the cut, and all of the top 3 involved running technical review meetings.
- Over the following three weeks, Kim’s team translated the 14 tasks into 41 learning objectives, retired 2 existing sales courses, and opened 5 new hands-on modules, and wrote an annual update of the chart into company policy.
- Six months later, the time for a new salesperson to take over an account alone fell from 14 months to 9, and sales training satisfaction rose from 3.8 to 4.4. The head of sales attached the chart as-is to the revised job description.