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A General Manager at a mid-size manufacturing firm in Pune retired last year after 22 years with the company.

Picture a room full of senior managers, sitting around a table with a 3×3 grid on the screen in front of them.

The last time your organisation hired someone for a managerial role, how long did the interview actually last? Forty-five minutes? An hour? And in that time, how much of what you observed was the candidate’s genuine capability, and how much was their ability to perform well under artificial conditions that have almost nothing to do with the job?

Every quarter, leadership teams across Indian organisations ask the same question: what do we need to do to develop our leaders faster? The answers they reach for are usually the same too: send them to a training programme, pair them with a senior mentor, or bring in an executive coach.

There is a particular pattern that repeats in training budgets across Indian organisations. A department head flags a performance concern. L&D responds by booking a vendor and scheduling a programme. Participants attend. Feedback forms are collected. And three months later, the original performance concern has not moved.

Most training rooms carry a familiar rhythm. Participants arrive, settle in, and spend the first hour catching up with the basics. The facilitator repeats foundational concepts that half the group already knows. The other half feels rushed. By the time the real work begins, the energy has already fragmented.

Generation Z, broadly defined as those born between 1997 and 2012, now makes up a growing share of the Indian workforce. The earliest members of this cohort have been in employment for five or six years. The majority is entering the workforce now or will do so within the next two or three years. By 2028, Gen Z will represent a significant proportion of front-line employees, junior managers, and early-career professionals in most Indian organisations.

Indian organisations have never moved faster. Digital transformation projects, restructuring exercises, post-merger integrations, hybrid work transitions, and leadership changes have stacked on top of each other in rapid succession, particularly since 2020. Many of these changes have been necessary and well-intentioned.

There is a quiet assumption that runs through most Indian organisations’ approach to capability building: that learning requires an external expert. A vendor with a programme. A consultant with a deck. A trainer flown in from another city.

Organisations across India are investing more than ever in structured talent decisions. Whether it is hiring for critical roles, identifying high-potential employees, or building succession pipelines, the demand for skilled competency assessors has grown sharply. Yet one question keeps surfacing in HR communities: what does it actually take to become a certified competency assessor, and why does it matter so much today?