about competences - the only way is up - not

The only way is up: not

Another common misconception is that the only way is up. Most competency classifications will put you in some level, and the structure will be like this:

For example, my employer wants me to do a self evaluation of my skills every year. So I go into this huge database of skills and select if I'm at level '0- No Skill', or '1- Acquired' or '2- Applied' or '3- Mastered'. And you can never go down on top of that. I'll argue that is silly: that database still has me as a master on Windows Clustering. Oh, I was at one point in time, I installed clusters of servers for many customers, have written a course about it and was teaching it to others. I knew the whole thing inside out. Back in 2000. I haven't touched a cluster or one of the new software versions of it since. So you tell me, am I still a master? Actually, I don't want to be a master anymore. Last month someone contacted me with a question on the latest cluster software, and he found me through the skills database. I've moved on in my career, I'm doing other things now. Leave my old skills (and me) alone!

Competencies go down. They fade out if you don't nurture them. We'll see how to build and guard your competencies later, but letting them fade away is a viable option. You can't keep up with everything for eternity. The thing is it should be a well informed choice, not an ugly surprise due to negligence. You are the guard of your competencies and you manage which ones to keep, grow or cut. That is a good thing. It puts you in the driver seat of your competencies, which are your abilities to perform and generate value ($$$). Employers have called this concept 'employability'. It's like a psychological labor contract that states 'I will keep you employed if you keep yourself employable by having valuable competencies'.

So what levels are there?

Good question, that will probably depend on the author you are asking. If we take the same Wikipedia article on competence back, we'll read:

Dreyfus and Dreyfus has introduced a language of the levels of competence in competence development. "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
  

So Dreyfus and Dreyfus (brothers, twins, father and son?) identify 5 levels, like a staircase. You start as a novice and climb the ladder till expert. There it stops and you stay expert for eternity. What strikes me in their classification is the intermediate steps like 'experienced beginner' and 'knowledgeable practitioner'.

There are levels in competency. Not everyone is as competent in a field as others. Not everyone is as capable of performing well in a domain. In the spirit of keeping things that should be simple simple, I'm introducing the following three levels of competency. It's close to the Dreyfus² one but cuts the intermediate ones:

Don't think of it as steps on a ladder, but as levels you have at one point in time in a certain competency domain. The classical thought is that you start as an apprentice, move on to practitioner status and grow into a master role. But you don't need to grow into levels you don't need or value. And you don't need to stay at a level. In fact, unless you keep investing in your competencies, they will naturally fade into lower levels.

Key point: there are three levels in competency: apprentice, practitioner and expert.