Competence is a standardized requirement for an individual to properly perform a

specific job. It encompasses a combination

of knowledge, skills and behavior utilized to improve performance. More
generally, competence is the state or quality of being adequately or well
qualified, having the ability to perform a specific role.

General definition
Competence is shown in action in a situation and context that might be different the next
time a person has to act. In emergency contexts, competent people will react to the
situation following behaviors they have previously found to succeed, hopefully to good
effect. To be competent a person needs 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, competence
grows through experience and the extent of an individual to learn and adapt.
However, there has been much discussion among academics about the issue of definitions.
The concept of competence has different meanings, and continues to remain one of the
most diffuse terms in the management development sector, and the organizational and
occupational literature.[1]
General competence development
Dreyfus and Dreyfus[citation needed] introduced nomenclature for the levels of competence in
competence development. The causative reasoning of such a language of levels of
competence 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 competence 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 competence 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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competence_(human_resources)

What is competence?
Competence is the combination of skills, attitude and behaviour which leads to an individual being able to perform a certain task to
a given level. In terms of developing competence to become a professionally registered engineer, this is done through educational
programmes, experience and professional development. Professional development is the route to building and maintaining
competence; through recognising and applying the learning you have gained to help you do your job better and plan to fill any skills
gaps you may have.

http://www.theiet.org/careers/cpd/getting-started/faqs/faq02.cfm

COMPONENTS OF COMPETENCY
There are four major components of competency:
1.SKILL: capabilities acquired through practice. It can be a financial skill such as budgeting, or a
verbal skill such as making a presentation.
2.KNOWLEDGE: understanding acquired through learning. This refers to a body of information
relevant to job performance. It is what people have to know to be able to perform a job, such as
knowledge of policies and procedures for a recruitment process.
3.PERSONAL ATTRIBUTES: inherent characteristics which are brought to the job, representing the
essential foundation upon which knowledge and skill can be developed.
4.BEHAVIOR: The observable demonstration of some competency, skill, knowledge and personal
attributes. It is an essentially definitive expression of a competency in that it is a set of action that,
presumably, can be observed, taught, learned, and measured.

http://www.articlesbase.com/human-resources-articles/competency-mapping-999751.html

Measuring Competence
http://measuringcompetence.blogspot.com/
Health outcomes are dependent on numerous human, environmental, political and other factors. It is
important for those interested in developing and measuring the success of educational strategies to
understand the impact that knowledge, skills and clinical reasoning have on competent human
behavior and the impact that that behavior has on the health outcome of interest.

It is often unrealistic and potentially demoralizing for both student and teacher to judge educational
effectiveness on changes in a specific health outcome when it is dependent on an interrelationship of
both human and nonhuman factors, many of which may be beyond human control. Those interested in
impacting on health outcomes through education should consider those outcomes first. Consider
convening a broad panel of stakeholders or conducting interviews with a variety of experts prior to
turning attention to the development of educational strategies.

The next step in developing an educational strategy is the clear explication of the competencies that
are logically related to the health outcome. In its simplest terms, ask what it is that the individual
needs to be able to do as the result of a realistic and practical educational intervention.

These abilities (competencies) need to be listed clearly and measurably. While this process is often
time consuming it will pay dividends when the instructor turns her or his attention to instructional
design, student and course evaluation.

For each objective, state in behavioral terms what the student should be able to do as the result of the
instruction, under what specific circumstances, and to what specific degree of effectiveness. For
example, if the competency is a kindergartner’s effectiveness in tying her or his shoes, an appropriate
objective would be:

With the assistance of the teacher or parent, the child will be able to tie both shoes correctly on four
out of five attempts.

Clinical skills are often essential components of healthcare competencies. Clinical skills are often
challenging to grasp and the most difficult to teach. As a test, consider teaching a friend to tie a
necktie. Fortunately, once learned these skills are forgotten very slowly and relearned almost
instantaneously within their appropriate context.

These skills may be quizzically context dependent, which may cause the student a great deal of
anxiety. For example, the midwife having gone several years without attending a birth may have great
difficulty explaining the hand skills that she or he will need for competent midwifery care. This midwife
may be astonished to find out that in the presence of a woman giving birth her hands “know” exactly
what to do.

An individual cannot be competent unless she or he knows what is required to do what is needed.
While clinical knowledge is obviously essential to any competency it is by no means equivalent. Many
know how to “talk the talk” without any ability to “walk the walk.” In healthcare, it would be dangerous
to consider these individuals competent.

Unfortunately, because knowledge is comparatively very easy to measure, it is often the focus of
educational testing. Testing knowledge alone does not provide a valid measure of competence and may
very well discriminate against competent individuals after they have left the immediate confines of the
classroom.

Knowledge is transient, naturally forgotten and replaced with alternative and less measurable “ways of
knowing.” Fortunately we live in a technologic world where information is readily available for those
who know how to retrieve it.

The instructor is therefore encouraged to measure knowledge only as a partial and immediate means
of measuring competency.

Both instructors and students commonly assume that information, once learned, is retained forever.
While conceptualizing the human brain as you would a computer hard drive is tempting, it fails to
provide an adequate metaphor. It is widely believed that information received in the human brain is
retained there for a long period of time, possibly forever. Unlike a computer, humans are not as readily
able to recall stored information after it is placed in memory.

Students without any previous exposure to the information and concepts presented in the classroom
can be expected to learn them very slowly. Once learned, these students will quickly forget most of
what they have learned. Fortunately, the next time the student is exposed to this content the student
will relearn it more quickly and gain a higher level of understanding of the subject. Following a second
round of instruction, these students will forget more slowly and retain a greater amount of baseline
knowledge. This cycle will continue indefinitely with repeated exposure to a subject. While even
experts in a particular subject will forget content, these individuals are able to relearn the content with
very minimal cues.

Clinical reasoning is often defined as the ability to use knowledge and skills in a manner that requires
the use of a structured decision making process utilizing higher order thinking skills. This process
includes the ability to transfer or apply concepts to new situations, to analyze the component parts of a
complex construct, to synthesize or build constructs using different sources of learned information, and
the ability to make critical evaluations. Healthcare providers use these higher order thinking skills
within a management process that involves appropriate collection and analysis of complex datasets,
diagnoses using these data, care planning and evaluation.

Clinical reasoning is a developmental process with profound novice-expert differences. Novices can be
expected to make decisions using a very structured framework that can be easily identified by an
instructor or mentor. The expert, however, utilizes a decision making process that is very
individualized and apparently unstructured. These developmental differences pose challenges for both
clinical instruction and continuing evaluation of clinicians. Experts will frequently state that they know
that they are making the correct decision, but are unable to explain why they are making it. The expert
instructor may have difficulty breaking down decisions for logical presentation to her or his students.
Likewise, the individual interested in assessing the quality of the decisions made by experts may find
them difficult to evaluate because of their unstructured nature.

Competency or the ability to productively behave in a manner requiring a complex array of knowledge,
skills and reasoning is difficult to measure in a manner considered reliable and valid. Blueprinting is a
logical process of selecting and appropriately distributing measurements of specific knowledge, skills
and reasoning related to a particular competency. In this manner, the instructor is able to evaluate to
competency by evaluating its measurable component parts.
Some implications
One of the first implications of experiential learning is that it is primarily to do with meaning and not
“subject” or “facts.” So it is highly personalised learning and the outcomes will likely include a change
or changes in behaviour that are personally chosen, not imposed or demanded from outside the
person.

Experiential learning tends, both in its process and its outcomes, to be anti-authoritarian. Individuals are
encouraged to make their own connections, their own theories, about the way things are.

That is another characteristic: the learning in this model will tend to be focus on “the way things are”, rather
than “the way things should be.” It is a learning rooted in the individual's perceptions and feelings, not in the
“received” reality.

Experiential learning is not “about” things outside of the individuals involved. It is learning that creates
reality out of the common, shared experience.

All of this means that individuals involved in such learning tend to develop their creativity, their
independence of thought and their relationship skills. These are very valuable and useful aptitudes in a world
of rapid, discontinuous change. These are aptitudes which support a high coping ability.

Note: Kani mund wala butangi ug footnote ni

kharma

Experiential education or, as I prefer to call it, experiential learning, has its basis in a particular
understanding of what learning is and how it happens. Peter developed a definition of learning: “Learning is
a more or less permanent change in behaviour or knowledge that comes about through disciplined reflection
on experience.”

Analysing this definition will start to show how radical it really is. The first thing to notice is that learning
leads to change. The implication is that if there is no change, learning has not happened. We do not
learn for the sake of learning, but for the sake of changing. If nothing changes as a result of our learning,
what have we learnt for?

The second important factor is that the learning happens not because of what a “teacher” or
“lecturer” says, but because of what the learner does. The way we express this in theoretical terms is that
in the traditional, teacher-centred model of learning, the construct precedes the experience, while in
experiential learning, the experience precedes the construct. The construct is developed out of the
experience.

Thirdly, then, the development of the construct happens through the process of a “disciplined
reflection” on the experience.