In fact, elsewhere I explicitly clarify that to me, competence in a role is often more than the sum of the basic knowledge and skills that are its necessary components. The residue can perhaps be expressed as “making adequate choices”, as I have expressed in a presentation elsewhere. This is closely tied up with codes of conduct, codes of practice, professionalism and ethics.

Or you can see it from the point of view of assessment. Basic component skills can be assessed at a test station of some kind. It just needs the right equipment. But there is a whole area of competence, in real life, in active roles, that cannot be assessed other than in that real life, in terms including all the various consequences, anticipated and unanticipated, of one’s actions.

Where I would definitely agree is that we often cannot specify precisely what the competence comprises.

(1) Gaps between the components. How do you make certain that the sum of all your components is equivalent to the overall competence? Domain specific understanding might help here. But you might find that one component is more important than another and a person’s weakness in that component ought to make a difference to the overall competency. Or on the other hand, maybe weakness in 4 of 6 components is irrelevant and can be ignored in relation to overall competence.

(2) A systems thinking approach suggests that there may well be emergent properties here that could easily be lost when competencies are decomposed.

I think that ‘nursing’ suffered from this type of approach. Some commentators have said (and I paraphrase greatly) that decomposing nursing competencies has led to insufficient stress on basic nursing care (cleaning, feeding, human interaction).

I suspect that with ‘competence’, we need to keep hold of the idea that these structures are tools and aids, but demonstrably not the whole picture. So we may not need to attempt to reflect everything electronically; good enough is sufficient.