A human resources development professional's framework for competencies during COVID‐19 and unrest

The purpose of this article is to explore the competencies required and exhibited by human resource development (HRD) professionals during a crisis. Keeping the current COVID–19 pandemic in the foreground, we examined the industrial, change management, and crisis management literature to illustrate how HRD professionals successfully helped their organizations overcome organizational challenges imposed by the pandemic. We propose some essential competencies that HRD professionals, as change agents, need to support organizations to survive a crisis in the long term. At the core of our model is learning, unlearning, and relearning. HRD professionals can develop the core competencies in conjunction with essential competencies such as flexibility, agility, thoughtfulness, effective communication, critical thinking, and creativity. Through our conceptual competency model, we propose that HRD can prepare its professionals holistically to support leaders and employees during a crisis.