What is a competency?

What is a competency?

• A Competency may be defined as the ability of a student / worker to accomplish tasks adequately, to find solutions and to realize them in real life situations.
• An effective ability to successfully carry out some activity which is totally identified. Competence is a real and demonstrated capability.
• It is a set of behaviours based on the effective mobilization and use of a range of resources.
• Set of behaviours refers to the capacity to use appropriately a variety of resources, both internal and external, in particular, learnings acquired in school or in everyday life. The concept of resources refers not only to everything that students have learnt at school, but also to their experiences, skills, interests, etc. Students may rely on external resources, such as their classmates, their teacher, documentation, etc. Finally, the idea of effective mobilization and use of resources implies that the behaviours associated with a competency involve more than just an automatic response or reflex. It implies that students, in seeking to attain a clearly identified objective, deliberately acquire and use intellectual and social concepts and skills to find an appropriate answer to a question or the solution to a problem.
• A competency is a system of conceptual and procedural parts of knowledge organised into operating schemes that, help identify a problem-task and its solution through an efficient action within a set of situations.
• Whenever the term competency is mentioned, a “know-how – to act” process is implied.
• A competency involves the necessary knowledge and capacities that a given solution requires.
• As it is possible to evaluate a competency through performance, then a competency is the final stage of a cycle, a period, and determines intermediate and long terms prospects of the learner’s development.