What is competence?
If you are in the people development business you will have heard of terms like learning objectives, terminal objectives, enabling objectives, outcomes, results, knowledge, skill, ability, understanding, competence, confidence, excellence, wow factor, X factor, max factor, arrrghh! If you are not, then forgive yourself for being confused.
Because you are being confused by professionals who ought to know better.
In the next few posts I will attempt to clarify a few points. Starting with competence.
What is competence?
Employers want training and development to enable their people to become and stay competent at the job that they have hired them to do. Excellence, bedazzlement, fabulousness will come only after they have demonstrated competence.
The only real measure of competence is the demonstration of it against a clear and simple definition of it.
If you are an employee — new or experienced — and are required to develop new competences for a new job or an existing one, you will want to know what do you need to do to prove that you are competent.
The key words here are DO and PROVE.
Knowledge is not competence
Knowledge may not even be understanding; there are many examples of people who know something but do not understand it. For instance, I know that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides (Pythagoras’s Theorem, in case you were wondering). I learned it at school but I don’t have a clue what it means or how to use it to put up a bookshelf!
You can have knowledge without understanding, but not the other way around. This is why understanding is far more important in the workplace than knowledge.
What about skill?
Skill is not competence either.
Skill without the underpinning understanding and the confidence to apply it in a range of realistic situations is of little use. I am skilled at playing one tune brilliantly on my piano, but I can’t read music, don’t know what the black and white keys mean and would die a thousand deaths if asked to perform in front of an audience.
To be competent therefore you need the understanding, skill and confidence to be able to apply it — and only when you have you done so are you competent.
But what is competence?
Competence has been undermined by its use in common language — when we describe someone as competent we imply that they are good enough, but not fantastic. When people talk about fantastic customer service rather than competent customer experience they are downgrading competence. If your definition of competence is a low grade description (e.g. good enough) then of course it is not going to be fantastic. But if your description of competence is for your people in your company to give customers the best possible customer experience to a very high standard, then competent in your terms is fantastic.
Let’s stretch the analogy further. If a definition of competence is “can cook an omelette” then no matter how disgusting it tastes it is still an omelette that has been cooked and therefore the person cooking it is competent. But if your definition of competence is “can cook a tasteful omelette incorporating hygienic preparation, the skilful use of appropriate tools and equipment, the right balance of ingredients to meet the customer’s preferences, the pleasing presentation on the plate and the clearing and cleaning up afterwards”, then you have an omelette cooked with competence but at a higher level.
Of course, someone could add bedazzlement, flair, personality, originality, and that cannot be a standard — but the unique gift of each individual to add their own special something goes beyond competent.
