about competences - can you prove it?

The two million question: can you prove it?

Up to the two million question: how do you know you are competent in X? Do I just believe what you say? Is it because someone signed a piece of paper saying so? Is it because you've done it for the past ten years? Is it because you write books on it?

Competences are important. They are the ingredients of your performance, and ultimately define what you are able to contribute to your personal life, to your professional life and to society. And especially the performance at work will get you an income. Therefore, it is important you can prove your competencies, so others can make optimal use turning your competencies into value. And that is value you receive your fair share of (unless you live under dictatorship or are an extremely bad negotiator).

Competence --> Performance --> value $ €

I'm in favor of providing evidence of competence, and keeping track of it as you travel through life: the education you receive as a child, the experience in your career as a working professional and any voluntary work you might still do after pension. Because competencies are such important ingredients of the information age and to your personal value, we cannot rely on vague promises, on only trust or on bad evidence. Equally, we should not remake the mistakes of the past thinking that one piece of paper earned when you are 18 or 25 will be sufficient proof of your competence for all eternity. We should not rely on one source of evidence. All evidence counts.

For example, I consider myself competent in corporate learning (as in making people in corporations learn stuff that is valuable and efficient). How do I know? Well, here is some evidence:

- I have been teaching corporate classes for 5 years, with top ratings from my students.

- I have written courses and books on technical matters that got published.

- For my MBA program, I did my dissertation on designing a proactive coaching service for e-learning and received a 17.

- I created the 6C learning framework for learning projects (www.6Clearning.com) that was applied at a few organisations

- I've been in my current job role setting up learning strategy and e-learning projects for 4 years

- I have been a speaker at Online Educa Berlin for the past 3 years, and am now part of the advisory board

- I got an internal certification at my employer as a certified learning specialist

- I blog about learning

Here is how I suggest it works: you keep track of all the evidence you have on your competency in domain X. You select what piece you show to who, because that information is private information (subject to privacy legislation) and your property. But the people looking at your evidence are the ones that determine if that evidence is any good, and how good it is. That is not your choice.

That is nothing new really. Compare it with sending a Curriculum Vitae (CV) to a potential future employer. You select what evidence of your worth you put into your CV. Suppose you are applying for the job of regional manager. You will probably mention your basic education, your MBA studies, and your internship with that same company back in your student life. You will probably not mention you got fired from a similar job, or that you collect stamps on the side because that is not relevant. Your future employer will look at your evidence and make his own estimation what the worth of that is. For example, in the US it matters not only if you got a diploma, but it matters what school it is from.

What I want to do however is making it less of a black box experience. When we go over the building blocks of competencies in later chapters, I'll give hints at strong and weak evidence. And I want us to be able to put numbers to that so we can compare in an unbiased way. For now, let's stop at the insight that competencies need to be proven.

Key point: competences are important because they indirectly lead to value (money). That's why it is important to provide evidence of them. All evidence counts. Here is how it works: you keep track of your evidence and control who can see what pieces of evidence. The people who want to use your competencies are free to interpret your evidence as they see fit.