A competency is (per Rodney Rogers of Portland State University) a persistent pattern of behaviour resulting from a cluster of knowledge, skills, abilities, and motivations. The persistence of those behaviors is an essential part of their being a competency.

Three tips:

Tip One: You are likely to run into a very specific problem, unless you are working with a fully-qualified competency expert. (Look for an international qualification, specifically in competencies, like City and Guilds of London, such as CPS has.)

Here is the problem: as you discuss competencies, you become very familiar with the information. You therefore take the material to higher and higher levels of abstraction. You also start to clump the competencies together, so you end up with about 12 broad abstract statements, covering a whole position. These are no use at all.

You don’t want a laundry list of 1000 things that your people know or can do, but a few 30,000 foot statements that only you truly understand will simply be filed and forgotten. (I’ve seen it often). There is a happy medium, usually because the competencies are backed up by assessment documents. (See point 2 – you don’t even have to write these – they are already written!)

The best book on this common trap  is actually a book about how to make a good presentation, because the same thing happens there. The presenter studies the material and then delivers the 30,000 foot level speech while audience members can’t  match this with their less complex understanding of the issues.

Buy “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. It has a crystal clear explanation of this issue. The Heath brothers will repair both your presentations, and your thinking about competency formation.

Another check: ask yourself “can I write an assessment document from these competencies?” If the answer is no, get a competency expert to give you a lesson on how to write them, before you waste time or money on getting it wrong! S/he should be able to find international assessment documents for you to work from too.

Tip Two: Don’t reinvent the wheel. US competencies do exist (e.g. the CUNA ones if you are in finance) or you can begin with the international ones for your industry. Then customize them. Then customize the assessment documents.

I gave you these starting points last July, so here is a reminder:

• The National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) in England & Wales
• The Scottish Vocational Qualification (SVQ)
• The National Qualifications Framework (NQF) of New Zealand
• The National Qualifications Framework (NQF) of South Africa (SAQA)
• The Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF)
• The European Qualification Framework (EQF)

Some newer systems, like the one in Singapore, have some great stuff.

Everything is there. My son/partner Greg got an extra half-letter for his MBA thesis by using one of these. What’s more, he needed only 30 minutes to find and download the competencies and assessment documents for every task in running a tanker-washing company (Aussie documents). These provided a complete training plan for his client. USF was filled with amazement. These things are also free.

Tip Three: In the case of competencies, the dictionary definition applies. The word competency means “having suitable or sufficient skill, knowledge, experience; properly qualified”. It means that your people know, and can do, everything necessary to do the job properly.

Competency is the standard you need. Someone is either competent, or not yet competent.

So we train towards the standard (competency) and we assess against the standard (competency). We manage to the standard (competency).

For some years, I worked in international ultra-precision engineering. I’d work with a SME, and create a protocol of competency (in Tampa, but with the UK, EU etc competencies in hand). If the person trained was not competent, the lathe slide would crash, the diamond tools would be ruined, and an engineer would have to go to the site (maybe the Far East) to fix the mess. The damage might cost $50,000. So the standard was competency.

If your employee does not know, or cannot do, what is required, you lose customers, reputation, team spirit, maybe materials and equipment. Your productivity and retention suffers. Maybe the damage is also $50,000. Your international competitors are all using competency-based learning and performance standards for that very reason. Clarify your competencies and use them!

This is the ability to think well.*

Can we create world-class thinkers in the schools of the United States, at a time when nations who are our economic competitors are pouring their resources into achieving the same objective?

The Florida Commissioner of Education’s Business Forum (28th Sept 08) pointed out how much catching up we have to do in thinking skills: e.g in areas like problem solving skills (Slide 31) where we rank 24th in the world.

(Ref:   http://www.fldoe.org/whatworks/ (with podcast of speech and slides) or alternative of slides:

http://www2.edtrust.org/EdTrust/Product+Catalog/PowerPoint.htm)

I explain my view of a skilled thinker below.*

The answer is a clear yes.  The data is in, and we can develop our students to have all the skills that we need to compete vigorously, internationally, in the Age of Knowledge. This is irrespective of socio-economic status, ethnic grouping etc.**

CPS is working with educators to create internationally-competitive thinkers, without placing a strain on our education budget. (There are innovative ways to do this, without significant costs, at a time of economic stress.)

The Counties that are interested in our peer-coachable programs are:

•    Concerned about test results, graduation results, college completion, and about how best to prepare our kids for well-paid, secure work in the new economy.
•    Disappointed that past training programs have not made enough real difference to how teachers actually teach for better thinking skills in the classroom.
•    Worried about budget cuts, and the need to deliver quality training, through affordable programs that deliver real results.

* What is a skilled thinker? The people who will always have a secure place in the world economy will be able to:

1) process information, assess the origins of data, analyze and evaluate concepts and think flexibly and logically.
2) be collaborative thinkers – able to use cooperative learning, and contribute to group thinking processes, including rigorous, critical thinking, strategic thinking, project management, or working in team-based creativity and innovation.

How does the CPS “less than $1 per teacher” solution work?

Each program includes:

1.    A learning session, facilitated by members of a school’s faculty, for their fellow-teachers, in their own schools, in any 60 minute staff meeting or development session.
2.    A consolidation and practice phase, guided by clearly-directed, concrete and structured competency-based outcomes, and supported by peer-coaching.
3.    A final assessment phase, based on the competencies. This may be self-assessment or peer-assisted assessment, measured against clear criteria.
4.    The meticulously-structured process is differentiated, covering three different levels of teaching experience.

➢    Team benefits: communication, motivation and team-building: the coaching uses the technique of appreciative inquiry, to ensure that mutual coaching is a strong, happy, team-building process. (This can also build communication before a curriculum mapping process.)
➢    Logistics benefits: travel or scheduling problems basically disappear. County professional development staff may also have more time to visit schools, support and coach.
➢    Budget benefits: minimal cost ($1 per teacher). CPS helps obtain funding, usually from business (the end user of education). The county owns “endless use” rights to the program, and can train new teachers as needed, and there is never a problem sourcing the material again.

The work of a teacher is to change, grow and re-form the neurological connections in the brains of his/her students. If our profession had a slogan of what we do, the way a rental car company does, it would be: “Avis rents cars, teacher change brains.”

** Where is the evidence that we can do this irrespective of ethnicity and socio-economic status? I’m not just talking about things like the KIPP schools. The Florida Commissioner of Education’s Business Forum featured schools like:

(Ref: http://www2.edtrust.org/EdTrust/Product+Catalog/PowerPoint.htm)

•    Centennial Place Elementary School, Atlanta, Georgia (Slide 47)
•    Lapwai Elementary, Lapwai, ID (Slide 50)
•    Norview High School Norfolk, Virginia (Slide 52)

The story told at the Commissioner’s forum of Ware Elementary School in Fort Riley, Kansas, that serves children from low-income Army families, was especially interesting, as many parents are in Iraq, and are not even present to support their children.

The other slide presentation from the Education Commissioner’s Business Forum is here: http://www2.edtrust.org/edtrust/Product+Catalog/recent+presentations

Note: CPS is committed to the economic success of our communities and the USA, and takes no position on any educational organization or the politics of education. We simply want all our people to have the skills to have rewarding, secure, legitimate work. We want them to build prosperity and security for themselves, their families and communities, and to pursue happiness, in a complex and changing world.

The real growth, and real wealth, has come largely from knowledge-based activity. We have created vast real market capitalization – in real growth – as we shift gradually from an industrial age, to what has been called the Information Age, the Digital Age or the Age of Knowledge. New innovation and thought-based entrepreneurship has created new industries and jobs few people dreamed existed, and this will continue to happen.

At the same time, there has been on-going growth in our scientific knowledge about learning. This comes from research using both MRI-neurologically based and from other testing/experimental-type work, and it has given us hugely enhanced insight into how to create knowledge and learning.

We now know how to build the metaskills which lead to effective organizations, and how to develop the underlying base-skills, attitudes, values and collaborative behaviors which are already powering the world’s most successful companies.

We know how to build collaborative knowledge communities, and how to support them as they create wealth.

We have a very good idea of how to scaffold learning to create the on-going development of competencies across all industries and managerial structures.

We also know how to stop wasting money when creating learning. We still spend billions on canned talk-and-chalk, death-by-powerpoint and click-and-forget training, but we’re getting smarter. For example:

a.            Most people in an organization understand that “if behavior didn’t change, the training didn’t happen”.
b.            We’re assessing learning transfer (more than 72 hours after training).

c.            Learners themselves are asking about what they need to learn, whether content is useful, and whether there was a front-end analysis (especially GenY, aka Gen-Why?).

d.            We’re using the right kind of channels and modalities to create learning. Finger-tip learning and performance support when that suits the situation, group work in other situations…

A lot of newer business thinking now places learning front-and-center in any effective business process. You’ll also see practical plans for implementing wealth-based, growth-through-knowledge, and analysis or benchmarking of how this is being done by the most successful companies of our time.

Great read: L Bryan and C Joyce’s Mobilizing Minds: Creating Wealth From Talent in the 21st Century Organizations. (Yes, it’s from McKinsey (who produced the famous Allstate document from the 1990s.) It’s also a fascinating look at how organizations can design themselves to maximize the knowledge-based development of wealth.

The authors focus mainly on large companies, but the principles are applicable right down to small business.

They tackle a lot of big, common problems, such as the dilemma of line-managers being focused on the tactics of making budget, which often prevents an organization’s benefiting from long-term strategic initiatives. They map each solution (e.g. the structures and processes that nurture a portfolio of developmental and entrepreneurial possibilities, at low cost and low risk.)