Competency and Performance Solutions

It is very easy to spend months, or $$$$$ on a competency-based program, and end up with very little to show for it.

Three tips:

Tip One: You are likely to run into a very specific problem, unless you are working with a fully-qualified competency expert. (Look for an international qualification, specifically in competencies, like City and Guilds of London, such as CPS has.)

Here is the problem: as you discuss competencies, you become very familiar with the information. You therefore take the material to higher and higher levels of abstraction. You also start to clump the competencies together, so you end up with about 12 broad abstract statements, covering a whole position. These are no use at all. Continue reading »

We live in a global economy where a single ability distinguishes the people who will always have well-paid secure work, from those who will not.

This is the ability to think well.*

Can we create world-class thinkers in the schools of the United States, at a time when nations who are our economic competitors are pouring their resources into achieving the same objective? Continue reading »

We all know that the US economy (as valued by Wall Street) grew a couple of trillion dollars between 1994 and the recession. Some of this was illusionary,  but there was real growth too. You don’t see new oil refineries and steel mills popping up all over the landscape.

The real growth, and real wealth, has come largely from knowledge-based activity. We have created vast real market capitalization – in real growth – as we shift gradually from an industrial age, to what has been called the Information Age, the Digital Age or the Age of Knowledge. New innovation and thought-based entrepreneurship has created new industries and jobs few people dreamed existed, and this will continue to happen.
Continue reading »