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!