Certified Skills and Personal Competence

CK Dwarakanath, Pegasus Institute for Excellence, Bangalore

Abstract: Enhancing personal competence is as important as obtaining a skill certificate such as

a college degree or a diploma. This is necessary during every role transition that we undergo
beginning with the first job, in order to make ourselves employable and role ready. The same is
true when we grow in life and slide into different roles. The professionals and entrepreneurs who
want to further develop their personal competence to suit their role requirements, approach L&D
institutions like Pegasus for developmental programmes. This is becoming an important
component of the continuous and progressive education during one’s life and career for
sustainable development. This paper describes the complementing aspects of personal
competence that support superior performance.

Keywords: certified skills – all learning that are offered in a curricular system, competence –
basic traits, self-image and motives, learning and development (L&D) – function in an
organisation that focuses on learning needs of the employees, Life Roles – the roles we take in
our lives, Career Path, Cognitive – all related to mind, Affective – all related to emotions and
feelings, Conative – all related to behaviour

Definitions: Competencies (singular-competency) are the human factors by which competence

depends - Leonardo Evangelista (2009).

In 1982 Richard Boyatzis a colleague of McClelland, defined competency as ‘an underlying

characteristic of an individual, which is causally related to effective or superior performance in a
job’ which could be ‘a motive, trait, skill, aspect of one's self-image or social role, or a body of
knowledge which he or she uses’

Competency means: each personal characteristic generally utilizable in the workplace, in school
or in ordinary life, regardless of the nature of the work or level of performance achievable
through its use” - Leonardo Evangelista (2009).
Personal competencies are not linked to any particular function. They include characteristics that
we use together with our technical competencies in order to do our work well. An example of a
personal competency is: “Interpersonal Sensitivity: Demonstrates respect for the opinions of
others, even when not in agreement.”-British Council, Learn English –
https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org

Background: ‘The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade
advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say
something new’ said Ivan Illich in his book ‘deschooling society’ (1971). McClelland (1973)
referred to competencies (involved in clusters of life outcome) such as communication, patience,
moderate goal setting and ego development. UNESCO source book on ‘Learning to Be’ refers to
importance of holistic education that includes learning to ‘be’ and ‘be together and live in
harmony’. Despite several such references to this inadequacy of learning only skills or cognitive
overload in the curricular system; the education has focused on skills and knowledge only. For
long and now, competence is seemingly overlooked and is not a major concern in the curricular
system. The drive seems to be to issue certificates as gate pass to life and career. Several
examples can be cited for accomplishment in life and career without the formal schooling. This
paper is a discussion of the complementary facets of education on the competence at various life
roles and career.

Roles in life: In life we are simultaneously

holding several roles namely a child, Friend
parent, spouse, boss, team and so on. We
have different descriptions and Parent Boss
responsibilities to the context in each of the
roles which are mostly conflicting. But, we Self
manage and learn in life to juggle the roles,
sometimes fail but continuously learn - Dr. Team Child
Zeb Watrucha, Manoj Jaiswal. The
competencies necessary in various roles are Spouse
Life Roles
different.
Roles in career: We enter into profession and take up several roles in our career. Typically we
join an organisation as a Trainee/intern during which we learn the skills needed to perform the
job, become role ready and appreciate organisational culture. Once we are confirmed in our
position we begin to contribute as an employee. There is a point we are asked to lead a few
workers and we are called as first time managers (FTM). FTMs learn to manage resources,
supervise tasks and begin to ‘listen’ to their teams. Their struggle is in leading people and
managing perceptions.

When we add more experience and develop on the job and business, we find ourselves in the
middle management. In this position we are coaching and guiding several managers reporting to
us. We are responsible for productivity, utilisation of resources and answerable on the client
deliverables. The role demands more operational leadership and management of client
perception. We also become experts in processes and innovation.

Those of us who have understood

the business and developed acumen
TOP become part of the top
MANAGER
MIDDLE management and head our
MANAGER respective functions or divisions.

FIRST TIME The role demands are different; we

Career Path
MANAGER are expected to track the industry
trends, vision, provide strategic
focus and alignment and so on. We are busy coaching our middle managers, attending meets,
mostly thinking and contributing to change and leadership. There is lot of agility expected in
people skills, mental abilities and results orientation.

Personal competence: The roles in our life and career path are varying and so are the
responsibilities. The competencies required are hence different as described above. The
competencies change with our role in life, the function and position we hold in the industry. The
learning required is beyond the certified skills that we acquire in our curricular study. Certified
skills complemented with personal competence helps us to offer superior performance Bud
Bilanich. Competencies depend on the underlying characteristics of ours such as our motives,
self-image and traits which together constitute personal competence. Our attitude and behaviour
(the visible portions or the above waterline aspects of the competency iceberg) are the indicators
of competence. This is scarce and the saying in industry is that, ‘hire people for attitude and train
for skills’. In some instances, where people do not want to train or feel they can outsource they
prefer to do so instead of developing the employees. Therefore it is very necessary for us to
develop our competencies to suit our roles. In fact in the industry ‘competency’ is used
synonymous with attitude and behaviour only!

Certified Skills: Various Institutions, Universities are offering courses, programmes at diploma
level (focus on vocation and skills), degree level (focus on basic skills and knowledge to prepare
for self-learning) and graduate studies (expected to bring in mastery in a particular subject and
offer basic research abilities and sometimes teaching skills). Further on, learners register for
research on particular topic and do in depth study (mostly self) and either do fundamental
research or applied research or experimental research. They become experts in their topic and
carry a lot of advisory capacity in their topic. The competencies required for the various roles in
the career path are learnt separately by professionals and rarely covered in the certificate
programmes that are offered in curricular study.

Learning personal competence: Listening as a skill is one of the personal competencies a

manager needs to perform his or her role well. In our experience (in L&D) we have found that
most of the managers and especially the FTMs needed development in Listening as a skill. The
FTMs find this hard to learn; many times they are unaware of this inability! The inability is
brought to their conscious and s/he can be helped to improve this skill and thus make it a habit or
an unconscious ability or competency. This education (of altering behaviour) follows the four
stages of competency model developed and proposed by Noel Burch 1970. This is only a small
initial step towards leadership; FTMs need to improve their comprehension before they become
middle managers and graduate to sensing situations and making meaning out of situations. These
higher abilities complement the knowledge gained in the diplomas and advanced certificate
programmes one attends.

Similarly, middle managers have this important task of managing perceptions in the team about
the company, client and so on. Perceptions are a result of one’s attitude, motivation,
expectations and experience. Cognitively we can understand this. To sense perceptions and to
modify them requires learning of practices and most importantly ability to negotiate self. It calls
for ability to reflect with the teams and discover their attitudes and expectations and how they
impact the perception and hence the organisation.

Likewise the top managers for example are involved in strategizing. Strategy on paper is
probably the easiest thing to do. Developing strategy on ground with the teams and translating
strategy into action requires competencies of higher order. One major competency we can
highlight here is ability to appreciate perspectives, build new perspectives and evolve the
strategy out of the perspectives. Being open to perspectives is itself a personal competence that is
scarce in most of the organisations and require tremendous developmental initiative and effort
from the individual and organisation. The programmes are aimed at including all perspective,
bringing leadership onto common ground and then integrate perspectives into organisational
strategy. One of the abilities we recommend all managers to acquire is to be able to sense the
context, contextually change self to adapt and lead change in the teams and organisation.

Change and Context: ‘Change is the only constant’, it is said and it is rapid now. The rate of
change is higher than before and the future is going to be Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and
Ambiguous (VUCA) - Harish Manwani (2013). It means that learning rate must be faster the rate
of change and we must be prepared for being open to becoming irrelevant (our capabilities) any
time. This calls for high levels of ‘humility’ and ‘courage’ which can only be learnt and not
taught in any curricular programme of study. For each role, the concepts required, the
accompanying professional practices and preparation of self will be altogether different. If one
can learn to sense context and comprehend what is relevant in the context, then we can ensure
that progression in life and career is continuous and without disruptions.
Context as described in the UNESCO source book (2002) at various levels is covering family,
school, faith (religion), work community, national level, world community and cosmic levels.
The book also speaks about learning at cognitive level and connecting it to affective level and
behaviour level. The book discusses the learning or valuing process in some detail with examples
- Lourdes R. Quisumbing (2001). The process of valuing and applying helps learner to translate
all that is learnt into behaviour. It is harder to learn this than the facts and concepts that we gain
while acquiring certified skills. The process will make us more self-aware and bring in the much
needed responsibility (response-ability) in various roles that we continue to assume or take.

Progressive Education: Progressive education as described by John Dewy has many of these
features. Few of the qualities are:

 Emphasis on learning by doing – hands-on projects, expeditionary learning,

experiential learning
 Collaborative and cooperative learning projects
 Education for social responsibility and democracy
 Selection of subject content by looking forward to ask what skills will be needed in
future society
 Emphasis on lifelong learning and social skills

The military services have a method continuously preparing the officers for future and have a
framework of learning/training for various ranks on different curriculum Samrat Chauhan
(2014). Each officer is trained to do the job of his immediate superior and trained to succeed or
take over as and when the post is given to him or her.

Learning for Educating: The in-house L&D functions and the consulting L&D institutions
have been trying to perfect this frame work for various roles in the industry and there are
programmes that are popular and successful. Pegasus (an L&D Institution) has developed two
such programmes (ODLC* and STEEP*) and are been offering to aspiring executives –
Vasudevan A and Sai Sambat (2011). Our learning in developing the curriculum is that we need
to learn continuously to educate. The rapid change in contexts necessitates learning for
educating. A group of educators will sense the context; co-create the content with the learner for
the learner to learn or adapt. The future educators will be facilitators who can learn fast and
innovate methods and forms that makes learning ‘easy’ for the learners. The facilitators will have
to identify the concepts or perspectives (that the learner has not acquired in the
college/university), the relevant professional practices and the personal competence required for
the learner in the current or future context. S/he has to develop the programme and also use
methods necessary to make learning easy. Simulations, role plays, group work, expert
interactions, visit to different institutions/organisations, teaching and case studies are part of the
Synergogy that is being used now [Synergogy is a group learning method of andragogy where
the learners are co-learners and there is no teacher].

Reflection Points: There is rapid change and the future is expected to be VUCA. The learning
needs will be changing rapidly and Entrepreneurship will be an essential competence for all.
Therefore the learning rate has to be necessarily faster than that. The certified skills offer
learning to ‘do’ and learning to ‘know’. Superior performance in life or career can come from
learning or developing personal competence only. The personal competence required for
different roles are different and have to be continuously and constant unlearning an learning. The
certificate (learning) programmes that include personal competence development as part of the
curriculum will be sought after in future and become popular. There will be continuous
education required for all and in future learners; they will have to shoulder the responsibility for
their own lifelong learning.

*ODLC – Organisation Development (by) Leading Change

*STEEP – Smart Track Executive Education Programme

References:

1. BUD BILANICH, INITIATIVE, SELF AWARENESS AND INTERPERSONAL

COMPETENCE, , executive coach, at SelfGrowth.com
2. Celinia E. Balonso, Values Education, , College of Education, University of the
Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City, DISP 2009
3. Claire Adamson, Learning in a VUCA world – How Knowledge Workers learn to
innovate
4. David C. McClelland, Testing for Competence Rather Than for "Intelligence", Harvard
University – American Psychologist January 1973
5. Harish Manwani, Leadership in VUCA world by Chairman, Hindustan Unilever Limited,
at the Annual General Meeting, held on 26 July 2013
6. Ivan Illich, ‘Deschooling Society’, book (1971), a radical critical discourse on education
as practised in "modern" economies
7. Leonardo Evangelista, Competence, Competencies and Career Guidance , IAEVG 2009
Conference, Jyväskylä, Finland, , www.orientamento.it
8. Lourdes R. Quisumbing, THE VALUES/ATTITUDINAL DIMENSION IN QUALITY
EDUCATION, President, UNESCO-APNIEVE, Chairperson of the Board of Trustees
and Professor Emeritus, Miriam College, Quezon City - Paper read at the International
Forum on Quality Education, Beijing, People’s Republic, of China, June 12-15, 2001
9. Sam Redding, Personal Competency, A Framework for Building Students’ Capacity to
Learn, , Center on Innovations in Learning , www.centeril.org
10. Samrat Chauhan, Pegasus Institute for Excellence, Drop dead succession: A Defence
Reality, Millennium Post on 9 April 2014, New Delhi,
(http://www.millenniumpost.in/NewsContent.aspx?NID=56192)
11. Zeb Watrucha Dr, Manoj Jaiswal Facilitating Self-Awareness, Serene Woods Publishers