The ability to systematically design and lead organizational change. This includes assessing change impact, driving stakeholder adoption, converting resistance into constructive input, and reinforcing change so it sticks.
Change management addresses the human side of moving an organization from its current state to a target state. While project management handles technical execution, change management focuses on helping the people affected by that change adopt and sustain new ways of working. The journey starts with recognizing the need for change, progresses through impact assessment and strategy development, builds organization-wide change capability, and ultimately reaches the creation of new change management paradigms. The depth of analysis, breadth of stakeholder engagement, and quality of strategic judgment required shift qualitatively at each stage.
This is where you first enter the world of organizational change. You start by observing why change happens and what impact it has on work and people. You recognize your own reaction patterns and adapt to new processes or systems with an open mindset. You listen to the emotions and concerns colleagues express and identify change-related information to apply in your own work. This is when you shift from passively accepting change to actively seeking to understand it.
What Comes Next
Once you've achieved most of this checklist, you're ready to enter the Change Supporter stage, where you'll actively participate in the change process and help colleagues around you adopt change. According to Prosci's ADKAR model (Hiatt, 2006), individuals must first develop Awareness and Desire before they can embrace change. As a concrete training method for the next stage, build the habit of diagnosing where you fall on the ADKAR five stages every time you receive a change announcement. Guiding colleagues through this same self-diagnosis is the core practice for making this transition.
The three-tier accreditation system — Foundation (1-2 years), Specialist (3-6 years), Master (7+ years) — defines experience-based proficiency boundaries and directly informs L2-L6 level design.
Five process groups (Evaluate, Formulate, Develop, Execute, Sustain) with 23 steps provide concrete behavioral evidence for level-specific checklist items.
The five-stage individual change process in the ADKAR model provides concrete behavioral evidence for checklist items focused on change recipients — awareness building, capability development, and reinforcement mechanism design.
The CMBoK-based (Change Management Body of Knowledge) competency model provides an authoritative definition of competencies required of change management professionals, reinforcing the theoretical foundation for the overall level design.
An eight-step change model derived from analyzing transformation attempts at over 100 companies (establish urgency, build coalition, develop vision, communicate vision, remove obstacles, generate short-term wins, consolidate gains, anchor in culture) provides empirical evidence for L3-L6 checklist items.
