Developing Knowledge, Skills And Competence.

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Wikipedia

Personal development or self improvement consists of activities that develop a person’s capabilities and potential, build human capital, facilitate employability, and enhance quality of life and the realization of dreams and aspirations. Personal development may take place over the course of an individual’s entire lifespan and is not limited to one stage of a person’s life. It can include official and informal actions for developing others in roles such as teacher, guide, counselor, manager, coach, or mentor, and it is not restricted to self-help. When personal development takes place in the context of institutions, it refers to the methods, programs, tools, techniques, and assessment systems offered to support positive adult development at the individual level in organizations.

Among other things, personal development may include the following activities:

Improving self-awareness
Improving self-knowledge
Improving skills and/or learning new ones
Building or renewing identity/self-esteem
Developing strengths or talents
Improving a career
Identifying or improving potential
Building employability or (alternatively) human capital
Enhancing lifestyle and/or the quality of life and time-management
Improving health
Improving wealth or social status
Fulfilling aspirations
Initiating a life enterprise
Defining and executing personal development plans (PDPs)
Improving social relations or emotional intelligence
Spiritual identity development and recognition

Personal development can also include developing other people’s skills and personalities. This can happen through roles such as those of a teacher or mentor, either through a personal competency (such as the alleged skill of certain managers in developing the potential of employees) or through a professional service (such as providing training, assessment, or coaching).

Beyond improving oneself and developing others, “personal development” labels a field of practice and research:

As a field of practice, personal development includes personal-development methods, learning programs, assessment systems, tools, and techniques.
As a field of research, personal-development topics appear in psychology journals, education research, management journals and books, and human-development economics.

Any sort of development—whether economic, political, biological, organizational or personal—requires a framework if one wishes to know whether a change has actually occurred. In the case of personal development, an individual often functions as the primary judge of improvement or of regression, but the validation of objective improvement requires assessment using standard criteria.

Personal-development frameworks may include:

Goals or benchmarks that define the end-points
Strategies or plans for reaching goals
Measurement and assessment of progress, levels or stages that define milestones along a development path
A feedback system to provide information on changes

Personal development as an industry has several business-relationship formats of operating. The main ways are business-to-consumer and business-to-business. However, there have been two new ways emerge: consumer-to-business and consumer-to-consumer. The personal development market had a global market size of 38.28 billion dollars in 2019.

The business-to-consumer market involves selling books, courses and techniques to individuals, such as:

Newly invented offerings in fields such as:
- Fitness
- Memory training
- Beauty enhancement
- Large-group awareness training
- Weight loss
Traditional practices such as:
- Yoga
- Martial arts
- Initiation ceremonies
- Meditation
- Spirituality
- Asceticism

Some programs deliver their content online. Many include tools sold with a program, such as motivational books for self-help, recipes for weight-loss or technical manuals for yoga, and martial-arts programs.

A partial list of personal development offerings on the business-to-individual market might include:

Books
Motivational speaking
e-Learning programs
Training workshops
Individual counseling
Life coaching
Time-management techniques

Some consulting firms such as DDI and FranklinCovey specialize in personal development, but as of 2009 generalist firms operating in the fields of human resources, recruitment and organizational strategy—such as Hewitt, Watson Wyatt Worldwide, Hay Group, McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Korn/Ferry—have entered what they perceive as a growing market, not to mention smaller firms and self-employed professionals who provide consulting, training and coaching.

Knowledge management (KM) is the collection of methods relating to creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organization. It refers to a multidisciplinary approach to achieve organisational objectives by making the best use of knowledge.

An established discipline since 1991, KM includes courses taught in the fields of business administration, information systems, management, library, and information science. Other fields may contribute to KM research, including information and media, computer science, public health and public policy. Several universities offer dedicated master’s degrees in knowledge management.

Many large companies, public institutions, and non-profit organisations have resources dedicated to internal KM efforts, often as a part of their business strategy, IT, or human resource management departments. Several consulting companies provide advice regarding KM to these organizations.

Knowledge management efforts typically focus on organisational objectives such as improved performance, competitive advantage, innovation, the sharing of lessons learned, integration, and continuous improvement of the organisation. These efforts overlap with organisational learning and may be distinguished from that by a greater focus on the management of knowledge as a strategic asset and on encouraging the sharing of knowledge. KM is an enabler of organizational learning.

The most complex scenario for knowledge management may be found in the context of supply chain as it involves multiple companies without an ownership relationship or hierarchy between them, being called by some authors as trans organizational or inter organizational knowledge. That complexity is additionally increased by industry 4.0 (or 4th industrial revolution) and digital transformation, as new challenges emerge from both the volume and speed of information flows and knowledge generation.

A skill is the learned ability to perform an action with determined results with good execution often within a given amount of time, energy, or both. Skills can often be divided into domain-general and domain-specific skills. For example, in the domain of work, some general skills would include time management, teamwork and leadership, self-motivation and others, whereas domain-specific skills would be used only for a certain job. Skill usually requires certain environmental stimuli and situations to assess the level of skill being shown and used.

A skill may be called an art when it represents a body of knowledge or branch of learning, as in the art of medicine or the art of war. Although the arts are also skills, there are many skills that form an art but have no connection to the fine arts.

People need a broad range of skills to contribute to the modern economy. A joint ASTD and U.S. Department of Labor study showed that through technology, the workplace is changing, and identified 16 basic skills that employees must have to be able to change with it. Three broad categories of skills are suggested and these are technical, human, and conceptual. The first two can be substituted with hard and soft skills, respectively.

Hard skills, also called technical skills, are any skills relating to a specific task or situation. It involves both understanding and proficiency in such specific activity that involves methods, processes, procedures, or techniques. These skills are easily quantifiable unlike soft skills, which are related to one’s personality. These are also skills that can be or have been tested and may entail some professional, technical, or academic qualification.

Holistic competencies is an umbrella term for 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 life-long learning and whole-person development.

Skilled workers have long had historical import (see Division of labor) as electricians, masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, bakers, brewers, coopers, printers and other occupations that are economically productive. Skilled workers were often politically active through their craft guilds.

An ability and capacity acquired through deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to smoothly and adaptively carryout complex activities or job functions involving ideas (cognitive skills), things (technical skills), and/or people (interpersonal skills).

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. Lundberg defined the concept in “Planning the Executive Development Program”. The term gained traction when in 1973, David McClelland wrote a seminal paper entitled, “Testing for Competence Rather Than for Intelligence”. The term was used by McClelland 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.