Understanding Competency: Balancing Knowledge, Skills, and Attitude in the Workplace (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Today's lesson is about the competency model. Someone is competent when they can consistently apply their knowledge, skills and attitude to the standard of performance required in the workplace. Sounds simple but let's investigate a little more. Knowledge is the acquisition of facts and the development of understanding what needs to be done, how and why. Increased knowledge about equipment and materials, products, processes and legislation is a critical aspect of competence. Skills are the actions or tasks that are performed. To demonstrate a skill, a person would need to perform and manage a complete task and deal appropriately with problems that might arise in a workplace environment. Skill can be further detailed by the dimensions of competency. Attitude is the way in which an individual goes about their work. Traits like reliability, conscientiousness and trustworthiness are behaviours that demonstrate an appropriate attitude. The foundation skills of navigating the world of work, getting the job done, interacting with others and ethics are another way of viewing attitude. Training attitude is tricky mostly because we have no idea what's going on in someone else's head. We can however set behaviour expectations that reflect a good attitude. Arriving to work on time, communicating respectfully with colleagues and looking for solutions rather than whining are all indicators of a good attitude. Employment aims to ensure that individuals have the knowledge, skill and attitude to undertake a work role to the standard expected in a range of employment situations. Let's look at what it might look like if we neglect to train all three aspects of competency. Kevin is very bright and capable. He readily recalls information and he performs tasks quickly and efficiently when he puts his mind to it. The problem is that Kevin is unreliable and leaves jobs half finished if he gets distracted. This means that his colleagues have to pick up after him, a fact that he seems unconcerned about. Abby is also clever and has a fantastic memory. She is known for being easy to work with and will always take an extra shift if it is offered. Unfortunately though, Abby has been unable to master some of the tasks she is expected to perform. She is very slow and often makes mistakes that have to be fixed. James can perform every task he is shown in exactly the way his trainer demonstrated. He does it with a smile and has proven himself to be trustworthy and conscientious. James still needs to be supervised though because he is unable to handle any situation out of the ordinary. He has problems recalling information that would help him solve problems. So what does competence look like? Introducing Nadine. Nadine became a supervisor after proving herself to be knowledgeable and able to apply common sense and logic to problem solving. She is proficient at all the tasks she and her team need to perform so she steps in to help during busy periods. Things tend to run smoothly and pleasantly when Nadine is the supervisor because she is so well organized and supportive of the team.