The Eppley Center does a lot of training and education, and one thing we prioritize is the use of competencies to guide our curriculum development. Sometimes, we pull in our research team to help define competencies before we start a training program with a new partner. Other times we use an established competency framework to prioritize content for our courses and workshops.
One question we hear a lot is, “what exactly is a competency?” While the concept is nothing new in the world of education and management, competencies can seem like convoluted jargon at times. Let’s clear things up with a few basic definitions. First, competencies are skills, knowledge, attitudes, and techniques that are inherent to successful job performance. There are competencies specific to a particular profession, like interpretation or facility management, and there are competencies that are part of an organization’s values or culture. Similarly, there are competencies that help define roles like supervision or management. One thing all competencies have in common is that they are defined and operationalized by demonstrable tasks and activities. In other words, we can measure competency as part of a training or on-the-job assessment.
Competencies can be grouped into frameworks that describe a field or industry. For example, the World Parks Academy Competency Framework includes competencies that address the wide range of jobs and skills related to parks, recreation, and public lands. These include things like landscape and outdoor management, leadership, resource stewardship, and business acumen. Each of these domains is made up of “sub-competencies” that describe the related skills, etc., and in turn these sub-competencies can be further defined by lists of associated tasks and performance metrics.
As you can imagine what starts as a broad subject area quickly can become a list of targeted learning objectives for short micro-trainings or long courses of study. Connecting professional learning to competencies helps clarify expectations and performance metrics for employees and supervisors. It also provides a common language for different agencies and organizations to describe their workforce and the services they provide.