White Paper on Develop Knowledge Skill And Competence

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Wikipedia

The Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSA) framework, is a series of narrative statements that, along with résumés, determines who the best applicants are when several candidates qualify for a job. The knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) necessary for the successful performance of a position are contained on each job vacancy announcement. They are:

Knowledge – the subjects, topics, and items of information that an employee should know at the time he or she is hired or moved into the job.
Skills – technical or manual proficiencies which are usually learned or acquired through training.
Abilities – the present demonstrable capacity to apply several knowledge and skills simultaneously in order to complete a task or perform an observable behaviour.

A similar model, the KASE (Knowledge, Attributes, Skills and Experience) framework is used by the careers advisory service at King’s College London.

KSA statements are also known as Evaluation Factors. Other agencies sometimes call them “Rating Factors”, “Quality Ranking Factors”, “Knowledge, Abilities, skills, and Other Characteristics”, or “Job Elements”. The name can be just a name but it often influences content and length of the essay. The required length of the KSA statements varies from employer to employer, but the usual length of the KSA factors is between 1/2 to 1½ pages long.

The scoring of KSA essays is often based on a ranking given to each individual essay, and there is often a cutoff score. High scores are derived through answering the KSA question as specifically as possible, providing examples from previous employment or training that clearly demonstrate the applicant meet the qualifications.

In 2009 the US Office of Personal Management asked federal agencies to stop requiring job applicants to fill out the questionnaires, and were phased out within a year of the announcement.

Competence is the set of demonstrable characteristics and skills that enable and improve the efficiency or performance of a job. The term “competence” first appeared in an article authored by R.W. White in 1959 as a concept for performance motivation. In 1970, Craig C. Lund berg defined the concept in “Planning the Executive Development Program”. The term gained traction when in 1973, David Mc Clelland wrote a seminal paper entitled, “Testing for Competence Rather Than for Intelligence”. The term was used by Mc Clelland commissioned by the State Department, to extract characteristics common to high-performing agents of embassy, and to help them recruit and develop. It has since been popularized by Richard Boyatzis and many others, such as T.F. Gilbert (1978) who used the concept in relationship to performance improvement. Its use varies widely, which leads to considerable misunderstanding.

Some scholars see “competence” as a combination of practical and theoretical knowledge, cognitive skills, behavior and values used to improve performance; or as the state or quality of being adequately or well qualified, having the ability to perform a specific role. For instance, management competency might include systems thinking and emotional intelligence, and skills in influence and negotiation.

Studies on competency indicate that competency covers a very complicated and extensive concept, and different scientists have different definitions of competency. In 1982, Zemek conducted a study on the definition of competence. He interviewed several specialists in the field of training to evaluate carefully what makes competence. After the interviews, he concluded: “There is no clear and unique agreement about what makes competency.”

Here are several definitions of competency by various researchers:

Hayes (1979): Competences generally include knowledge, motivation, social characteristic and roles, or skills of one person in accordance with the demands of organizations of their clerks.
Boyatzis (1982): Competence lies in the individual’s capacity which superposes the person’s behavior with needed parameters as the results of this adaptation make the organization to hire him.
Albanese (1989): Competences are individual’s characteristics which are used to effect on the organization’s management.
Woodruff (1991): Competence is a combination of two topics of personal competence and merit at work. Personal merit is a concept which refers to the dimensions of artificial behavior in order to show the competence performance and merit at work depends on the competences of the person in his field.
Mansfield (1997): The personal specifications which effect on a better performance are called competence.
Standard (2001) ICB (IPMA Competence Baseline): Competence is a group of knowledge, personal attitudes, skills and related experiences which are needed for the person’s success.
Rankin (2002): A collection of behaviors and skills which people are expected to show in their organization.
Unido (United Nations Industrial Development Organization) (2002): Competence is defined as knowledge, skill and specifications which can cause one person to act better, not considering his special proficiency in that job.
Industrial Development Organization of United States (2002): Competences are a collection of personal skills related to knowledge and personal specifications which can make competence in people without having practices and related specialized knowledge.
CRNBC (College Of Registered Nurses Of British Columbia) (2009): Competences are a collection of knowledge, skills, behavior and power of judging which can cause competence in people without having enough practice and specialized knowledge.
Hay group (2012): Measurable characteristics of a person which are related to efficient actions at work, organization and special culture.
Chan and her team (the University of Hong Kong) (2017, 2019): Holistic competency is an umbrella term inclusive of different types of generic skills (e.g. critical thinking, problem-solving skills), positive values, and attitudes (e.g. resilience, appreciation for others) which are essential for students’ life-long learning and whole-person development.
The ARZESH Competency Model (2018): Competency is a series of knowledge, abilities, skills, experiences and behaviors, which leads to the effective performance of individual’s activities. Competency is measurable and could be developed through training. It is also breakable into the smaller criteria.

Competency is also used as a more general description of the requirements of human beings in organizations and communities.

If someone is able to do required tasks at the target level of proficiency, they are “competent” in that area.

Competency is sometimes thought of as being shown in action in a situation and context that might be different the next time a person has to act. In emergencies, competent people may react to a situation following behaviors they have previously found to succeed. To be competent a person would need to be able to interpret the situation in the context and to have a repertoire of possible actions to take and have trained in the possible actions in the repertoire, if this is relevant. Regardless of training, competency would grow through experience and the extent of an individual’s capacity to learn and adapt. However, research has found that it is not easy to assess competencies and competence development.

Competency has multiple different meanings, and remains one of the most diffuse terms in the management development sector, and the organizational and occupational literature.

Competencies are also what people need to be successful in their jobs. Job competencies are not the same as job task. Competencies include all the related knowledge, skills, abilities, and attributes that form a person’s job. This set of context-specific qualities is correlated with superior job performance and can be used as a standard against which to measure job performance as well as to develop, recruit, and hire employees.

Competencies and competency models may be applicable to all employees in an organization or they may be position specific. Identifying employee competencies can contribute to improved organizational performance. They are most effective if they meet several critical standards, including linkage to, and leverage within an organization’s human resource system.

Core competencies differentiate an organization from its competition and create a company’s competitive advantage in the marketplace. An organizational core competency is its strategic strength.

Competencies provide organizations with a way to define in behavioral terms what it is that people need to do to produce the results that the organization desires, in a way that is in keep with its culture. By having competencies defined in the organization, it allows employees to know what they need to be productive. When properly defined, competencies, allows organizations to evaluate the extent to which behaviors employees are demonstrating and where they may be lacking. For competencies where employees are lacking, they can learn. This will allow organizations to know potentially what resources they may need to help the employee develop and learn those competencies. Competencies can distinguish and differentiate your organization from your competitors. While two organizations may be alike in financial results, the way in which the results were achieve could be different based on the competencies that fit their particular strategy and organizational culture. Lastly, competencies can provide a structured model that can be used to integrate management practices throughout the organization. Competencies that align their recruiting, performance management, training and development and reward practices to reinforce key behaviors that the organization values.

Dreyfus and Dreyfus introduced nomenclature for the levels of competence in competency development. The causative reasoning of such a language of levels of competency may be seen in their paper on Calculative Rationality titled, “From Socrates to Expert Systems: The Limits and Dangers of Calculative Rationality”. The five levels proposed by Dreyfus and Dreyfus were:

Novice: Rule-based behaviour, strongly limited and inflexible
Experienced Beginner: Incorporates aspects of the situation
Practitioner: Acting consciously from long-term goals and plans
Knowledgeable practitioner: Sees the situation as a whole and acts from personal conviction
Expert: Has an intuitive understanding of the situation and zooms in on the central aspects

The process of competency development is a lifelong series of doing and reflecting. As competencies apply to careers as well as jobs, lifelong competency development is linked with personal development as a management concept. And it requires a special environment, where the rules are necessary in order to introduce novices, but people at a more advanced level of competency will systematically break the rules if the situations requires it. This environment is synonymously described using terms such as learning organization, knowledge creation, self-organizing and empowerment.

Within a specific organization or professional community, professional competency is frequently valued. They are usually the same competencies that must be demonstrated in a job interview. But today there is another way of looking at it: that there are general areas of occupational competency required to retain a post, or earn a promotion. For all organizations and communities there is a set of primary tasks that competent people have to contribute to all the time. For a university student, for example, the primary tasks could be:

Handling theory
Handling methods
Handling the information of the assignment

The four general areas of competency are:

Meaning Competency: The person assessed must be able to identify with the purpose of the organization or community and act from the preferred future in accordance with the values of the organization or community.
Relation Competency: The ability to create and nurture connections to the stakeholders of the primary tasks must be shown.
Learning Competency: The person assessed must be able to create and look for situations that make it possible to experiment with the set of solutions that make it possible to complete the primary tasks and reflect on the experience.
Change Competency: The person assessed must be able to act in new ways when it will promote the purpose of the organization or community and make the preferred future come to life.

The Occupational Competency movement was initiated by David McClelland in the 1960s with a view to moving away from traditional attempts to describe competency in terms of knowledge, skills and attitudes and to focus instead on the specific self-image, values, traits, and motive dispositions (i.e. relatively enduring characteristics of people) that are found to consistently distinguish outstanding from typical performance in a given job or role. Different competencies predict outstanding performance in different roles, and that there is a limited number of competencies that predict outstanding performance in any given job or role. Thus, a trait that is a “competency” for one job might not predict outstanding performance in a different role. There is hence research on competencies needed in specific jobs or contexts.

Nevertheless, there have been developments in research relating to the nature, development, and assessment of high-level competencies in homes, schools, and workplaces.