Workforce Competency Development and Production Efficiency in Textile Manufacturing: An Integrated Assessment Framework

The competitiveness of textile manufacturing increasingly depends on the competencies of its workforce, as enterprises move from the primary processing of raw materials towards products with higher value added, automated equipment and international quality and social compliance standards. In practice, however, workforce development and production efficiency are usually assessed separately: personnel departments record training hours, while production units monitor output, downtime and defects. This article proposes an integrated assessment framework that links the two. Drawing on a structured review of human capital and competency theory, experimental and firm-level evidence on the returns to training, industrial engineering methods and official data on the textile industry of Uzbekistan, the study constructs an Integrated Competency Index based on weighted competency domains, a Production Efficiency Index that combines overall equipment effectiveness, line efficiency, labour productivity and first-pass quality, and a diagnostic matrix that relates the two indices. The evidence reviewed shows that well-designed training can raise productivity by 13.5–23% and yield a net return of 256% to the firm, while the scale of the task is considerable: employment in the textile industry of Uzbekistan grew from about 188,000 in 2018 to 623,000 in 2025, and globally 59 of every 100 workers will need training by 2030. The framework allows managers to determine whether efficiency gaps stem from competency deficits or from technical and organisational constraints, and to target investment in training accordingly.