To realize benefits from any competency-based strategy, everyone must have a common understanding of what it means to be competent, what is required to develop a competency, and how one can reliably assess whether an individual or an organization is competent or not.

As it used within this series, a competency is a standardized qualification for reliably achieving a set of desired outcomes. Whether performing work within a specific occupation, or fulfilling a defined role within a defined work process, such qualifications involve applying combinations of your knowledge, aptitude, understanding, and attitudes. In this context, the definitions and interactions of these competency elements must be taken into account in order to fully develop the corresponding competency. Knowledge is the theoretical and practical understanding of one or more subjects. From this knowledge, aptitude (or skills) can be developed, which is the innate and learned ability to achieve results within acceptable standards of performance (such as outlays of time and energy. As aptitudes are developed over time, the resulting experience allows you to understand more about it, and allow you to explain, predict, and reason from your knowledge and aptitude. As you do this, your attitudes influence the choices that you make as you perform your work. These choices typically are influenced by your behaviors and beliefs you have about the environment you are operating within.

Such competencies are typically aggregated within organizations to allow the collected talents of their teams to be deployed as capabilities that have business value. Such capabilities - repeatable patterns of action on which the organization’s assets (human, physical, and financial) can be leveraged – can then enable the organization to achieve the business objectives of customers. Competent individuals are expected to perform a defined set of activities at a prescribed level of performance. As such standards are established by an organization, and the organization develops experience in applying them, performance norms can be developed and used as the basis for planning and making commitments within projects, even before specific individuals have been assigned to do the work.

An example may reinforce the interplay between these concepts. Consider the task of selecting a surgeon in order to perform a medical procedure on an individual who has a life-threatening disease. Clearly, knowledge of the human body and of the etiology of the disease is essential to making the right decisions regarding diagnosis and treatment. Most doctors acquire this kind of knowledge in medical school. However, before they are licensed to practice medicine, they must also develop aptitude in applying this knowledge by completing a surgical residency, and thus become proficient at doing such work. While this knowledge of the relevant facts may be adequate at the completion of their classroom-based coursework, they will only be authorized to practice medicine professionally (and independently) after their skills have been adequately demonstrated to the satisfaction of a licensing board. The members of such a board will be comprised of previously accredited professionals. Once licensed, these professionals can then form a medical practice that can offer services to patients who need medical care for a well-defined subset of medical procedures.

Educators, professional societies, and licensing boards have developed considerable expertise in analyzing and developing competencies across a range of situations. As the above example indicates, competencies must consider how knowledge and skills are applied within a community over time, through:

• inquiry and investigations to understand what is required for the subject at hand
• structuring and tailoring of the approaches to be taken for a given situation
• acquisition and preparation of required material, tools and information
• information transformations and operations to achieve the desired results
• reflection to determine next steps and capture key insights

In order for competencies to be effective in such complex situations, they must be designed perform within a concept of operations which assures that they are applied fairly and consistently by different evaluators. Such a framework should be derived from a robust set of requirements that accommodate these scenarios, provide adequate training and documentation to guide their implementation, and provide appropriate substantiation for the evaluators to make an informed decision. Such details are necessary to develop trust in the competency framework, and in those who have been qualified by the framework to perform evaluations and report results. We expect different doctors to consistently diagnose any disease they encounter, and should expect similar consistency from our competency assessors.

The definition of acceptable performance will depend upon the characteristics of the situation in which tasks must be performed. A person’s performance may be considered competent& within one setting, but that level of performance may not be at all acceptable in a different situation, even though both situations share common knowledge and evaluation criteria. As an example, consider the performance requirements for a baseball pitcher in sandlot ball. The performance expectations to play at that level are certainly not the same as what is required within Major League Baseball. Even though the rules are similar, the level of skill development expected is much higher when performing at the professional level than it is when operating at an amateur level.

This is why there is often a progressive sequence of levels of performance defined in many situations.  Some typical ones include:

• Novice: When an individual can perform rule-based activities, in structured situations that have well-defined precedents, usually with active mentoring
• Beginner: When individuals learn how to adjust their behavior according to the work situation they are assigned, and consistently makes appropriate decisions about how they should approach new situations that they are presented with, without impacting others. The confidence which this performance demonstrates enables the individual to be assigned broader responsibilities in team settings with reduced levels of oversight.
• Practitioner: Once a beginner has learned how to act conscientiously and reliably across a range of assignments, and meets performance standards in all these settings, they may achieve competency at a practitioner level. This achievement often would requires a demonstrated ability to make reasonable tradeoffs between short and long term goals, as their work situation evolves over time.
• Professional: When an individual learns to understand and analyze patterns across multiple situations systemically, and can act on this understanding from experience and personal conviction, they begin to perform as a professional. Typically, such individuals also are expected to offer meaningful advice to others at this level. This advice may be presented through a network of trusted relationships, or translated into improved work standards that can be utilized by others. In either situation, the ability to communicate these situations and appropriate responses is a crucial characteristic of performance at this level.
• Expert: When an individual has developed an intuitive understanding of the community’s knowledge, experience, and constraints within a comprehensive body of knowledge, domain of work activities, and understanding of customer needs. This enables the individual to synthesize and tailor existing approaches for action within new and unprecedented situations, markets, processes, and tools that can offer sustainable benefits for the underlying business over time.

In practice, individual performance progresses through many different aspects of these levels at different rates, for many different knowledge areas, as a set of progressively increasing responsibilities are assigned throughout a person's career. Too often, competency is only evaluated for placement or certification at the beginner or practitioner level. Yet each of these levels is increasingly important to an organization.

To make competency determinations across this diverse set of responsibilities and experience levels, an accepted body of knowledge must exist, be acceptable to the community under evaluation, and be used as the basis of these evaluations; otherwise, consistent evaluations will be difficult to make due to the biases and varying experiences of different evaluators. Agreeing on such a body of knowledge, and keeping it up to date, can be quite difficult, especially in emerging fields, or in areas where technology changes quickly. Yet without such support infrastructure, competencies can become a political football between interest groups that strive to use the underlying concepts and debates as a means to carve out power for their own purposes, rather than a means to extend the supply of competent resources over time.

Such a body of knowledge may also be used to substantiate qualifications for working in a highly regulated environment, or to justify promoting an individual to a higher-level position within an organization, as their knowledge and skills are demonstrated in multiple assignments. When formal competency demonstrations are required in such consideration, a candidate typically is expected to assemble a portfolio of their representative work that substantiates their knowledge, skills, and experience. Typically, the candidate then submits their portfolio to an individual (or agency) authorized for conducting competency evaluations. Such agents will themselves previously have demonstrated their own competence in performing such assessments. A governance system should also be in place that assures that these individuals have the appropriate knowledge and experience themselves, so that the resulting determinations will meet standards for reliability and trustworthiness.