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Competences in the development cycle

Using competences within a development cycle - planning, undertaking, recording and reviewing.

Using competences for self-development

Using competences can help you to focus your professional development, ensuring the activities you undertake contribute directly to increasing performance in your current role or to making effective progress towards your future goals.

Getting started

Firstly, you need to decide what competences to use.  We would strongly recommend that you make use of existing, recognised frameworks where possible, but you may wish to adapt these to suit your own circumstances.  There is help with choosing from existing competence frameworks and advice on adapting/creating your own on our choosing page.

If you are already familiar with the Professional Development (PD) Cycle, it will be easy to see how competences fit into the process of structured PD.

You may wish to assess against all the competences in a framework at the outset, to help you decide which are priority for development, or you may already know what skills you want to concentrate on and just want to benchmark you current skill level.  If you choose only those that you wish to concentrate on developing over the next year or so, try to provide a balance between technical aspects of your job and managerial and behavioural aspects such as teamwork, communicating effectively, etc. 

Your identified competences may be ones you have agreed with your employer or in discussion with your mentor, and may be linked to your appraisal.

The next step is to assess your current level of competence and then compare it against the level required to meet your objectives. This will enable you to identify the strengths that might help you to move your career on, and the shortfalls which need to be addressed. You can then focus your development on those competences where you have a shortfall, planning suitable activities to help you improve.

The process of assessing and recording evidence to prove competence provides valuable information that you may wish to refer to regularly, to update and to present to others.  You will also wish to re-assess at regular intervals, demonstrating your improved performance.  To facilitate this, the IET would recommend using a suitable online system that provides the functionality to meet your needs.  IET Career Manager will guide you though the steps of assessing your competence, recording evidence, setting objectives, planning and tracking your development.