People Got Talent!

Competency is all around us. It pervades our lives. We see competency on t.v, - for example “America’s Got Talent” – talented people, regardless of their age, gender or social background.  performing all manner of stage acts that wow the show’s judges and viewers. “How did they do that?”, we often ask ourselves…

ISO 9001 includes a requirement for an organization’s people, involved in the Quality Management System, to be competent in their work responsibilities. The normative reference (vocabulary) document, ISO 9000, defines competence as “the demonstrated ability to apply skills and knowledge”. Those t.v show contestants could certainly demonstrate skills and knowledge, but how did they become so competent? They weren’t likely to be born with some “gift”, therefore, their performance is most likely to have been the result of combination of factors…

Practice, Practice, Practice…

 Zig Ziglar is credited with this: “Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.” Most of those performers will likely attribute their abilities to a combination of education (performance “theory”), training (master classes or similar) and practice, practice, practice… Competent performers can usually demonstrate a specific part of their act, and describe the reason and purpose for it, often including some portion of the related theory.

It is the same with many work related activities in manufacturing. A journeyman machining center setter, for example, would be able to demonstrate competencies in terms of:

·         Blueprint reading

·         Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T)

·         Machine feeds and speeds

·         Material properties

·         CNC Programming

If we analyze these, we can see that some knowledge aspects are going to be education based – for example material properties which affect the way a part is machined, or CNC programming. Some knowledge aspects may be training derived, either from a classroom event and/or “on-the-job”. Furthermore, a significant proportion of competency is experiential – which comes from practice, practice, practice.

When an organization is determining competencies, it’s worth breaking down the required records into these three categories:

·         Education

·         Training

·         Experience

Then, creating some criteria against which a person can then be evaluated, for the job they do, should be relatively straightforward. Creating a record of these criteria and that they were demonstrated would meet the ISO 9001:2015 requirements stated in section 7.2.

Management must prepare themselves, however, to discover that some employees may not be at the same level of competency they were considered to have reached. From Burch’s Learning Model of the 1970s, we can see there are 4 distinct stages of competency:

·         Unconscious Incompetence

·         Conscious Incompetence

·         Conscious Competence

·         Unconscious Competence

It’s important to recognize, however, that these stages are not concrete and changes can affect the person such that they regress from unconscious competence right back to unconscious incompetence. Anyone who has encountered a MS Windows update will attest to experiencing that.