The Council of Engineering and Scientific Specialty Boards is an accreditor of accreditation boards, and serves as an aggregator of best practices for developing certification criteria for assessing the competencies of individuals within engineering and scientific. They have identified 4 criteria for such certifications (and implicitly, for competency measures in general):

1. They must be useful to constituents
2. They must differentiate what makes the competency distinct and important
3. They must be relevant to the work which must be performed and the outcomes which must be achieved
4. They must connect with what we experience as individuals

To be affordable and effective, any competency endeavor must therefore be supported with educational offerings that reliably deliver on multiple fronts, providing:

• practical, learner-centered application experiences that are relevant to near-term work assignments
• performance-based objectives that demonstrate how value is most typically realized within those situations
• meaningful knowledge transfer mechanisms that reinforce these values in realistic operating conditions
• reliable and affordable delivery mechanisms that offer this learning in flexible ways for different types of consumption

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that mastery of a skill is a result of frequent repetitions, rather than exceptional talent, or the right teachers. If he's right, one of the keys to using competencies in an effective way is to design them around the operations that are performed most frequently, while allowing them to be tailored for the unique characteristics of each circumstance. One doesn't become competent at being a shortstop, but rather in anticipating, reacting to, fielding, and throwing balls to a team member as they are hit to that position. Mastery of each of these operations is the subject of thousands of hours of practice for professional baseball players, and while some of this experience is transferable to to other positions, it is unlikely that a player will be able to perform at a consistent level in all of those positions. In a similar way, mastering a particular role in a development team (say, as a designer) requires the operations that are performed by designers to be broken down into their atomic actions, and evaluated so the patterns of peak performance can be highly optimized and understood. None of that will happen without motivation, which is typically a blend of passion, purpose, and pressure.

Competencies offer the potential to enable individuals to continue to adapt and extend their knowledge, skills, and behaviors and apply them to new situations. Competencies also enables organizations to collectively become more capable as aggregated team member experience is captured and leveraged over time, on both similar and more novel situations. In this context, knowledge can be valued as an asset, as much as capital equipment or physical plants are for more traditional brick-and-mortar facilities But like these other assets, the value of this knowledge will depreciate over time, if it is not adequately maintained. As a result, for organizations to both maintain their relevance, and ensure their capabilities are enhanced over time, its individuals must be able to:

• properly diagnose situations and select appropriate practices from an accepted body of knowledge that defines how that knowledge should be applied
• tailor these practices to unique situations which they are presented with, including obtaining approvals when appropriate
• obtaining information and training necessary to implement these practices
• making appropriate decisions and communicating the necessary actions for moving forward

The underlying processes and practices which are used to perform this work must form a coherent value stream. This requires:

• homogeneous work requirements
• normalization of contextual situations that trigger decisions and alternative approaches
• uniform work standards that are appropriate to these different business situations

Since Engineering is fundamentally a blending of knowledge of science, application domains, and economics, many different kinds of knowledge are required:

Some competences appear to depend on know-how—practical, hands-on forms of knowledge gained through incremental improvements to products and processes. Other competences depend on know why - theoretical forms of understanding that enable the creation of new kinds of products and processes. Other forms of competence seem to come from a organization’s know-what - a strategic form of understanding about the value creating purposes to which available know-how and know-why forms of knowledge may be applied.

The key practices of defined roles that operate across value streams, whether for product management, project management, or architects, should be integrated and rationalized across the responsible organizations, so the collective assets required to implement these roles are complete and coherent. Aligning these practices across the thought leaders who drive the culture and behaviors within such organizations will only be accomplished through activities that accomplish an explicit evaluation and normalization of their conceptual mental models, and of the underlying assumptions which they are based upon.

If the underlying knowledge required to perform work across these different mental models was obtained within diverse organizational structures, by individuals with different background or performance standards, or under a different set of operating principles, this knowledge will obviously have diminished value when you try to applly it to new situations. If these gaps accumulate over time, and go unreconciled, they collectively may even erode the underlying concensus that may have formed around abstract notions of competency, and fragment the potential of other improvement investments, and even the value propositions which they offer.

 David Notkin describes critical requirements for any body of knowledge

1. It must reflect actual achievable good practice that ensures quality consistent with the stated interest; it is not that following such practices are guaranteed to produce perfect software systems, but rather that doing so can provide reasonably intuitive expectations of quality.
2. It must delineate roles among the participants in a project.
3. It must identify the differential expertise of specialties
   
4. It must command the respect of the community.
5. It must embrace change in each and every dimension of its definition; that is, it must be associated with a robust process for ensuring that it is continually updated to account for the rapid change both in knowledge and also in the underlying technologies.

Unfortunately, it is easy for politics to enter any process that involves designing competencies. This is because gaps associated with competency often receive special funding allocations, since the impacts of trying to accomplish work with workers who are not prepared is widely recognized. Unfortunately, there are motivations for incumbants to also use competencies as a way of controlling entry into their communities of practice, so those that get to do the defining can claim they have something they can provide to others as a regulated service. Yet in such circumstances, there may not be a sufficiently robust infrastructure in place to reliably transfer the necessary knowledge and skills to candidates, and satisfy the above requirements.

Too often, in such circumstances, a competency element is described soley by whether it is done or not (with an abstract definition), as opposed to clearly delineating how well it accomplishes the business result that is expected from it. As a result, the target expression of competence that is expected must be dilineated. Do you want a selected set of actions to always be demonstrated, to just be  considered, or what? What level of knowledge is being targetted? Is the wisdom behind the facts being drawn out?