(18th in my logic of competence series)

Having prepared the ground, I’m now going to address in more detail how levels of competence can best be represented, and the implications for the rest of representing competence structures. Levels can be represented similar to other competence concept definitions, but need different relationships.

I’ve written about how giving levels to competence reflects common usage, at least for competence concepts that are not entirely assessable, and that the labels commonly used for levels are not unique identifiers; about how defining levels of assessment fits into a competence structure; and lately about how defining levels is one approach to raising the assessability of competence concepts.

Later: shortly after first writing this, I put together the ideas on levels more coherently in a paper and a presentation for the COME-HR conference, Brussels.

Some new terms

Now, to take further this idea of raising assessability of concepts, it would be useful to define some new terms to do with assessability. It would be really good to know if anyone else has thought along this direction, and how their thoughts compare.

First, may we define a binarily assessable concept, or “binary” for short, as a concept typically formulated as something that a person either has or does not have, and where there is substantial agreement between assessors over whether any particular person actually has or does not have it. My understanding is that the majority of concepts used in NOSs are intended to be of this type.

Second, may we define a rankably assessable concept, or “rankable” for short, as a concept typically formulated as something a person may have to varying degrees, and where there is substantial agreement between assessors over whether two people have a similar amount of it, or who has more. IQ might be a rather old-fashioned and out-of-favour example of this. Speed and accuracy of performing given tasks would be another very common example (and widely used in TV shows), though that would be more applicable to simpler skills than occupational competence. Sports have many scales of this kind. On the occupational front, a rankable might be a concept where “better” means “more additional abilities added on”, while still remaining the same basic concept. Many complex tasks have a competence scale, where people start off knowing about it and being able to follow someone doing it, then perform the tasks in safe environments under supervision, working towards independent ability and mastery. In effect, what is happening here is that additional abilities are being added to the core of necessary understanding.

Last, may we define a unorderly assessable concept, or “unordered” for short, as any concept that is not binary or rankable, but still assessable. For it to remain assessable despite possible disagreement about who is better, there at least has to be substantial agreement between assessors about the evidence which would be relevant to an assessment of the ability of a person in this area. In these cases, assessors would tend to agree about each others’ judgements, though they might not come up with the same points. Multi-faceted abilities would be good examples: take management competence. I don’t think there is just one single accepted scale of managerial ability, as different managers are better or worse at different aspects of management. Communication skills (with no detailed definition of what is meant) might be another good example. Any vague competence-related concept that is reasonably meaningful and coherent might fall into this category. But it would probably not include concepts such as “nice person” where people would disagree even about what evidence would count in its support.

Defining level relationships

If you allow these new terms, definitions of level relationships can be more clearly expressed. The clearest and most obvious scenario is that levels can be defined as binaries related to rankables. Using an example from my previous post, success as a pop songwriter based on song sales/downloads is rankable, and we could define levels of success in that in terms of particular sales, hits in the top ten, etc. You could name the levels as you liked — for instance, “beginner songwriter”, “one hit songwriter”, “established songwriter”, “successful songwriter”, “top flight songwriter”. You would write the criteria for each level, and those criteria would be binary, allowing you to judge clearly which category would be attributed to a given songwriter. Of course, to recall, the inner logic of levels is that higher levels encompass lower levels. We could give the number 1 to beginner, up to number 5 for top flight.

To start formalising this, we would need an identifier for the “pop songwriter” ability, and then to create identifiers for each defined level. Part of a pop songwriter competence framework could be the definitions, along with their identifiers, and then a representation of the level relationships. Each level relationship, as defined in the framework, would have the unlevelled ability identifier, the level identifier, the level number and the level label.

If we were to make an information model of a level definition/relationship as an independent entity, this would mean that it would include:

• the fact that this is a level relationship;
• the levelled, binary concept ID;
• the framework ID;
• the level number;
• the unlevelled, rankable concept ID;
• the level label.

If this is represented within a framework, the link to the containing framework is implicit, so might not show clearly. But the need for this should be clear if a level structure is represented separately.

As well as defining levels for a particular area like songwriting, it is possible similarly (as many actual level frameworks do) to define a set of generic levels that can apply to a range of rankable, or even unordered, concepts. This seems to me to be a good way of understanding what frameworks like the EQF do. Because there is no specific unlevelled concept in such a framework, we have to make inclusion of the unlevelled concept within the information model optional. The other thing that is optional is the level label. Many levels have labels as well as numbers, but not all. The number, however, though it is frequently left out from some level frameworks, is essential if the logic of ordering is to be present.

Level attribution

A key point that has been growing in conviction in me is that relationships for level attribution and level definition need to be treated separately. In this context, the word “attribution” suggests that a level is an attribute, either of a competence concept or of a person. It feels quite close to other sorts of categorisation.

Representing the attribution of levels is pretty straightforward. Whether levels are educational, professional, or developmental, they can be attributed to competence concepts, to individual claims and to requirements. Such an attribution can be expressed using the identifier of the competence concept, a relationship meaning “… is attributed the level …”, and an identifier for the level.

If we say that a certain well-defined and binarily assessable ability is at, say, EQF competence level 3, it is an aid to cross-referencing; an aid to locating that ability in comparison with other abilities that may be at the same or different levels.

A level can be attributed to:

• a separate competence concept definition;
• an ability item claimed by an individual;
• an ability item required in a job specification;
• a separate intended learning outcome for a course or course unit;
• a whole course unit;
• to a whole qualification, but care needs to be exercised, as many qualifications have components at mixed levels.

An assessment can result in the assessor or awarding body attributing an ability level to an individual in a particular area. This means that, in their judgement, that individual’s ability in the area is well described by the level descriptors.

Combining generic levels with areas of skill or competence

Let’s look more closely at combining generic levels with general areas of skill or competence, in such a way that the combination is more assessable. A good example of this is associated with the Europass Language Passport (ELP) that I mentioned in post 4. The Council of Europe’s “Common European Framework of Reference for Languages” (CEFRL), embodied in the ELP, make little sense without the addition of specific languages in which proficiency is assessed. Thus, the CEFRL’s “common reference levels” are not binarily assessable, just as “able to speak French” is not. The reference levels are designed to be independent of any particular language.

Thus, to represent a claim or a requirement for language proficiency, one needs both a language identifier and an identifier for the level. It would be very easy in practice to construct a URI identifier for each combination. The exact method of construction would need to be widely agreed, but as an example, we could define a URI for the CEFRL — e.g. http://example.eu/CEFRL/ — and then binary concept URIs expressing levels could be constructed something like this:

http://example.eu/CEFRL/language/mode/level#number

where “language” is replaced by the appropriate IETF language tag; “mode” is replaced by one of “listening”, “reading”, “spoken_interaction”, “spoken_production” or “writing” (or agreed equivalents, possibly in other languages); “level” is replaced by one of “basic_user”, “independent_user”, “proficient_user”, “A1″, “A2″, “B1″, “B2″, “C1″, “C2″; and “number” is replaced by, say, 10, 20, 30, 40 , 50 or 60 corresponding to A1 through to C2. (These numbers are not part of the CEFRL, but are needed for the formalisation proposed here.) A web service would be arranged where putting the URI into a browser (making an http request) would return a page with a description of the level and the language, plus other appropriate machine readable metadata, including links to components that are not binarily assessable in themselves. “Italian reading B1″ could be a short description, generated by formula, not separately, and a long description could also be generated automatically combining the descriptions of the language, reading, and the level criteria.

In principle, a similar approach could be taken for any other level system. The defining authority would define URIs for all separate binarily assessable abilities, and publish a full structure expressing how each one relates to each other one. Short descriptions of the combinations could simply combine the titles or short descriptions from each component. No new information is needed to combine a generic level with a specific area. With a new URI to represent the combination, a request for information about that combination can return information already available elsewhere about the generic level and the specific area. If a new URI for the combination is not defined, it is not possible to represent the combination formally. What one can do instead is to note a claim or a requirement for the generic level, and give the particular area in the description. This seems like a reasonable fall-back position.

Relating levels to optionality

Optionality was one of the less obvious features discussed previously, as it does not occur in NOSs. It’s informative to consider how optionality relates to levels.

I’m not certain about this, but I think we would want to say that if a definition has optional parts, it is not likely to be binarily assessable, and that levelled concepts are normally binarily assessable. A definition with optional parts is more likely to be rankable than binary, and it could even fail to be rankably assessable, rather being merely unordered. So, on the whole, defining levels should surely reduce, and ideally eliminate, optionality: levelled concepts should ideally have no optionality, or at least less than the “parent” unlevelled concept.

Proposals

So in conclusion here are my proposals for representing levels, as level-defining relations.

1. Use of levels Use levels as one way of relating binarily assessable concepts to rankable ones.
2. The framework Define a set of related levels together in a coherent framework. Give this framework a URI identifier of its own. The framework may or may not include definitions of the related unlevelled and levelled concepts.
3. The unlevelled concept In cases of levels of a concept more general than the set of levels you are defining, ensure the unlevelled concept has one URI. In a generic framework, this may not be present.
4. The levels Represent each level as a competence concept in its own right, complete with short and long descriptions, and a URI as identifier.
5. Level numbering Give each level a number, such that higher levels have higher numbers. Sometimes consecutive numbers from 0 or 1 will work, but if you think judgements of personal ability may lie in between the levels you define, you may want to choose numbers that make good sense to people who will use the levels.
6. Level labels If you are trying to represent levels where labels already exist in common usage, record these labels as part of the structured definition of the appropriate level. Sometimes these labels may look numeric, but (as with UK degree classes) the numbers may be the wrong way round, so they really are labels, not level numbers. Labels are optional: if a separate label is not defined, the level number is used as the label.
7. The level relationships These should be represented explicitly as part of the framework. This can either be separately, or within a hierarchical structure.

Representing level definitions allows me to add to the diagram that last appeared at the bottom of post 14, showing the idea of what should be there to represent levels. The diagram includes defining level relationships, but not yet attributing levels (which is more like categorising in other ways.)

Later, I’ll go back to the overall concept map to see how the ideas that I’ve been developing in recent months fit in to the whole, and change the picture somewhat. But first, some long-delayed extra thoughts on specificity, questions and answers related to competence.

(16th in my logic of competence series)

I’ve mentioned NOSs (UK National Occupational Standards) many times in earlier posts in this series, (3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 14) but last week I was fortunate to visit a real SSC — LANTRA — talk to some very friendly and helpful people there and elsewhere, and reflect further on the logic of NOSs.

One thing that became clear is that NOSs have specific uses, not exactly the same as some of the other competence-related concepts I’ve been writing about. Following this up, on the UKCES website I soon found the very helpful “Guide to Developing National Occupational Standards” (pdf) by Geoff Carroll and Trevor Boutall, written quite recently: March 2010. For brevity, I’ll refer to this as “the NOS Guide”.

The NOS Guide

I won’t review the whole NOS Guide, beyond saying that it is an invaluable guide to current thinking and practice around NOSs. But I will pick out a few things that are relevant: to my discussion of the logic of competence; to how to represent the particular features of NOS structures; and towards how we represent the kinds of competence-related structures that are not part of the NOS world.

The NOS Guide distinguishes occupational competence and skill. Its definitions aren’t watertight, but generally they are in keeping with the idea that a skill is something that is independent of its context, not necessarily in itself valuable, whereas an occupational competence in a “work function” involves applying skills (and knowledge). Occupational competence is “what it means to be competent in a work role” (page 7), and this seems close enough to my formulation “the ability to do what is required“, and with the corresponding EQF definitions. But this doesn’t help greatly in drawing a clear line between the two. What is considered a work function might depend not only on the particularities of the job itself, and also the detail in which it has been analysed for defining a particular job role. In the end, while the distinction makes some sense, the dividing line still looks fairly arbitrary, which justifies my support for not making a distinction in representation. This seems confirmed also by the fact that, later, when the NOS Guide discusses Functional Analysis (more of which below), the competence/skill distinction is barely mentioned.

The NOS Guide advocates a common language for representing skill or occupational competence at any granularity, ideally involving one brief sentence, containing:

1. at least one action verb;
2. at least one object for the verb;
3. optionally, an indication of context or conditions.

Some people (including M. David Merrill, and following him, Lester Gilbert) advocate detailed vocabularies for the component parts of this sentence. While one may doubt the practicality of ever compiling complete general vocabularies, perhaps we ought to allow at least for the possiblity of representing verbs, objects and conditions distinctly, for any particular domain, represented in a domain ontology. If it were possible, this would help with:

• ensuring consistency and comprehensibility;
• search and cross-referencing;
• revision.

But it makes sense not to make these structures mandatory, as most likely there are too many edge cases.

The whole of Section 2 of the NOS Guide is devoted to what the authors refer to as “Functional Analysis”. This involves identifying a “Key Purpose”, the “Main Functions” that need to happen to achieve the Key Purpose, and subordinate to those, the possible NOSs that set out what needs to happen to achieve each main function. (What is referred to in the NOS Guide as “a NOS” has also previously been called a “Unit”, and for clarity I’ll refer to them as “NOS units”.) Each NOS unit in turn contains performance criteria, and necessary supporting “knowledge and understanding”. However, these layers are not rigid. Sometimes, a wide-reaching purpose may be analysed by more than one layer of functions, and sometimes a NOS unit is divided into elements.

It makes sense not to attempt to make absolute distinctions between the different layers. (See also my post #14.) For the purposes of representation, this implies that each competence concept definition is represented in the same way, whichever layer it might be seen as belonging to; layers are related through “broader” and “narrower” relationships between the competence concepts, but different bodies may distinguish different layers. In eCOTOOL particularly, I’ve come to call competence concept definitions, in any layer, “ability items” for short, and I’ll use this terminology from here.

One particularly interesting section of the NOS Guide is its Section 2.9, where attention turns to the identification of NOS units themselves, as the component parts of the Main Functions. In view of the authority of this document, it is highly worthwhile studying what the Guide says about the nature of NOS units. Section 2.9 directly tackles the question of what size a NOS should be. Four relevant points are made, of which I’ll distinguish just two.

First, there is what we could call the criterion of individual activity. The Guide says: “NOS apply to the work of individuals. Each NOS should be written in such a way that it can be performed by an individual staff member.” I look at this both ways for complementary views. When two aspects of a role may reasonably and justifiably be performed separately by separate individuals, there should be separate NOS units. Conversely, when two aspects of a role are practically always performed by the same person, they naturally belong within the same NOS unit.

Second, I’ve put together manageability and distinctness. The Guide says that, if too large, the “size of the resulting NOS … could result in a document that is quite large and probably not well received by the employers or staff members who will be using them”, and also that it matters “whether or not things are seen as distinct activities which involve different skills and knowledge sets.” These seem to me both to be to do with fitting the size of the NOS unit to human expectations and requirements. In the end, however, the size of NOS units is a matter of good practice, not formal constraint.

Section 3 of the NOS Guide deals with using existing NOS units, and given the good sense of reuse, it seems right to discuss this before detailing creating your own. The relationship between the standards one is creating and existing NOS units could well be represented formally. Other existing NOS units may be

• “imported” as is, with the permission of the originating body
• “tailored”, that is modified slightly to suit the new context, but without any substantive change in what is covered (again, with permission)
• used as the basis of a new NOS unit.

In the first two cases, the unit title remains the same; but in the other case where the content changes, the unit title should change as well. Interestingly, there seems no formal way of stating that a new NOS unit is based on an existing one, but changed too much to be counted as “tailored”.

Section 4, on creating your own NOSs, is useful particularly from the point of view of formalising NOS structures. The “mandatory NOS components” are set out as:

1. Unique Reference Number
2. Title
3. Overview
4. Performance Criteria
5. Knowledge and Understanding
6. Technical Data

and I’ll briefly go over each of these here.

It would be so easy, in principle, to recast a Unique Reference Number as a URI! However, the UKCES has not yet mandated this, and no SSC seems to have taken it up either. (I’m hoping to persuade some.) If a URI was also given to the broader items (e.g. key purposes and main functions) then the road would be open to a “linked data” approach to representing the relationships between structural components.

Title is standard Dublin Core, while Overview maps reasonably to dcterms:description.

Performance criteria may be seen as the finest granularity ability items represented in a NOS, and are strictly parts of NOS units. They have the same short sentence structure as both NOS units and broader functions and purposes. In principle, each performance criterion could also have its own URI. A performance criterion could then be treated like other ability items, and further analysed, explained or described elsewhere. An issue for NOSs is that performance criteria are not identified separately, and therefore there is no way within a NOS structure to indicate similarity or overlap between performance criteria appearing in different NOS units, whether or not the wording is the same. On the other hand, if NOS structures could give URIs to the performance criteria, they could be reused, for example to suggest that evidence within one NOS unit would provide also useful evidence within a different NOS unit.

Performance criteria within NOS units need to be valid across a sector. Thus they must not embody methods, etc., that are fine for one typical employer but wrong for another. They must also be practically assessable. These are reasons for avoiding evaluative adverbs, like the Guide’s example “promptly”, which may be evaluated differently in different contexts. If there are going to be contextual differences, they need to be more clearly signalled by referring e.g. to written guidance that forms part of the knowledge required.

Knowledge and understanding are clearly different from performance criteria. Items of knowledge are set out like performance criteria, but separately in their own section within a NOS unit. As hinted just above, the inclusion of explicit knowledge can mean that a generalised performance criterion can often work if the knowledge dependent on context is factored out, in places where there would otherwise be no common approach to assessment.

In principle, knowledge can be assessed, but the methods of assessment differ from those of performance criteria. Action verbs such as “state”, “recall”, “explain”, “choose” (on the basis on knowledge) might be introduced, but perhaps are not absolutely essential, in that a knowledge item may be assessed on the basis of various behaviour. Knowledge is then treated (by eCOTOOL and others) as another kind of ability item, alongside performance criteria. The different kinds of ability item may be distinguished — for example following the EQF, as knowledge, skills, and competence — but there are several possible categorisations.

The NOS Guide gives the following technical data as mandatory:

1. the name of the standards-setting organisation
2. the version number
3. the date of approval of the current version
4. the planned date of future review
5. the validity of the NOS: “current”; “under revision”; “legacy”
6. the status of the NOS: “original”; “imported”; “tailored”
7. where the status is imported or tailored, the name of the originating organisation and the Unique Reference Number of the original NOS.

These could very easily be incorporated into a metadata schema. For imported and tailored NOS units, a way of referring to the original could be specified, so that web-based tools could immediately jump to the original for comparison. The NOS Guide goes on to give more optional parts, each of which could be included in a metadata schema as optional.

Issues emerging from the NOS Guide

One of the things that is stressed in the NOS Guide (e.g. page 32) is that the Functional Analysis should result in components (main functions, at least) that are both necessary and sufficient. That’s quite a demand — is it realistic, or could it be characterised as reductionist?

Optionality

The issue of optionality has been covered in the previous post in this series. Clearly, if NOS structures are to be necessary and sufficient, logically there can be no optionality. It seems that, practically, the NOS approach avoids optionality in two complementary ways. Some options are personal ways of doing things, at levels more finely grained than NOS units. Explicitly, NOS units should be written to be inclusive of the diversity of practice: they should not prescribe particular behaviours that represent only some people’s ways of doing things. Other options involve broader granularity than the NOS unit. The NOS Guide implies this in the discussion of tailoring. It may be that one body wants to create a NOS unit that is similar to an existing one. But if the “demand” of the new version NOS unit is not the same as the original, it is a new NOS unit, not a tailored version of the original one.

The NOS Guide does not offer any way of formally documenting the relationship between variant ways of achieving the same aim, or function (other than, perhaps, simple reference). This may lead to some inefficiencies down the line, when people recognise that achieving one NOS unit is really good evidence for reaching the standard of a related NOS unit, but there is no general and automatic way of documenting that or taking it into account. We should, I suggest, be aiming at an overall structure, and strategy, that documents as much relationship as we can reliably represent. This suggests allowing for optionality in an overall scheme, but leaving it out for NOSs.

Levels and assessability

The other big issue is levels. The very idea of level is somehow anathema to the NOS view. A person either has achieved a NOS, and is competent in the area, or has not yet acheived that NOS. There is no provision for grades of achievement. Compare this with the whole of the academic world, where people almost always give marks and grades, comparing and ranking people’s performance. The vocational world does have levels — think of the EQF levels, that are intended for the vocational as well as the academic world — but often in the vocational world a higher level is seen as the addition of other separate skills or occupational competences, not as improving levels of the same ones.

A related idea came to me while writing this post. NOSs rightly and properly emphasise the need to be assessable — to have a effective standard, you must be able to tell if someone has reached the standard or not — though the assessment method doesn’t have to be specified in advance. But there are many vaguer competence-related concepts. Take “communication skills” as a common example. It is impossible to assess whether someone has communication skills in general, without giving a specification of just what skills are meant. Every wakeful person has some ability to communicate! But we frequently see cases where that kind of unassessably vague concept is used as a heading around which to gather evidence. It does make sense to ask a person about evidence for their “communication skills”, or to describe them, and then perhaps to assess whether these are adequate for a particular job or role.

But then, thinking about it, there is a correspondence here. A concept that is too vague to assess is just the kind of concept for which one might define (assessable) levels. And if a concept has various levels, it follows that whether a person has the (unlevelled) concept cannot be assessed in the binary way of “competent” and “not yet competent”. This explains why the NOS approach does not have levels, as levels would imply a concept that cannot be assessed in the required binary way. Rather than call unlevelled concepts “vague”, we could just call them something like “not properly assessable”, implying the need to add extra detail before the concept becomes assessable. That extra detail could be a whole level scheme, or simply a specification of a single-level standard (i.e. one that is simply reached or not yet reached).

In conclusion, I cannot see a problem with specifying a representation for skill and competence structures that includes non-assessable concepts, along with levels as one way of detailing them. The “profile” for NOS use can still explicity exclude them, if that is the preferred way forward.

Update 2011-08-22 and later

After talking further with Geoff Carroll I’ve clarified above that NOSs are to do specifically with occupational competence rather than, e.g. learning competence. And having been pushed into this particular can of worms, I’d better say more about assessability to get a clear run up to levels.

(15th in my logic of competence series)

Discussion suggests that it is important to lay out the argument in favour of optionality in competence structures. I touched on this post 7 in this series, talking about component parts, and styles or variants. But here I want to challenge the “purist” view that competence structures should always be definite, and never optional.

Leaving aside the inevitable uncertainty at the edges of ability, what a certain person can do is at least reasonably definite at any one time. If you say that a person can do “A or B or C”, it is probably because you have not found out which of them they can actually do. A personal claim explicitly composed of options would seem rather strange. People do, however, claim broader abilities that could be fulfilled in diverse narrower ways, without always specifying which way they do it.

Requirements, on the other hand, involve optionality much more centrally. Because people vary enormously in the detail of their abilities, it is not hard to fall into the trap of over-specifying job requirements, to the point where no candidate fits the exact requirements (unless you have, unfairly, carefully tailored the requirements to fit one particular person who you want to take on). So, in practice, many detailed job requirements include reasonable alternatives. If there are three different reasonable ways to build a brick wall, I am unlikely to care too much which a builder users. What I care about is whether the end product is of good quality. There are not only different techniques in different trades and crafts, but also different approaches in professional life, to management, or even competences like surgery.

When we call something an ability or competence, sometimes we ignore the fact that different people have their own different styles of doing it. If you look in sufficiently fine detail, it could be that most abilities differ between different people. Certainly, the nature of complex tasks and problems means that, if people are not channelled strongly into using a particular approach, each person’s exploration, and the different past experiences they bring, tends to lead to idiosyncracies in the approach that they develop. Perhaps because people are particularly complex, managing people is one area that tends to be done in different ways, whether in the workplace or the school classroom. There are very many other examples of complex tasks done in (sometimes subtly) different ways by different people.

Another aspect of optionality is apparent in recruitment practice. Commonly, some abilities are classified as “essential”, others are “desirable”. The desirable ones are regarded as optional in terms of the judgement of whether someone is a good candidate for a particular role. Is that so different from “competence”? One of the basic foundations I proposed for the logic of competence is the formulation of job requirements.

Now, you may still argue that does not mean that the definitions of particular abilities necessarily involve optionality. And it is true that it is possible to avoid the appearance of optionality, by never naming an ability together with its optional constituents. But perhaps the question here should not be one of whether such purity is possible, but instead what is the approach that most naturally represents how people think, while not straying from other important insights. Purity is often reached only at the cost of practicality and understandability.

What does seem clear is that if we allow optionality in structural relationships for competence definitions, we can represent with the same structure both personal claims without options, requirements that have options, and teaching, learning, assessment and qualification structures, which very often have options. If, on the other hand, we were to choose a purist approach that disallows optionality for abilities as pure concepts, we would still have to introduce an extra optionality mechanism for requirements, for teaching structures, for learning structures, for assessment structures, and for qualification structures, all of which are closely related to competence. Having the possibility of optionality does not mean that optionality is required, so an approach that allows optionality will also cover non-optional personal abilities and claims. So why have two mechanisms when one will serve perfectly well?

To have optionality in competence structures, we have to have two kinds of “part of” relationship, or if you prefer, two kinds of both broader and narrower. Here I’ll call them “necessary part of” and “optional part of”, because to me, “necessary” sounds more generally applicable and natural than “mandatory” or “compulsory”.

If you have a wider ability, and if in some authority’s definition that wider ability has necessary narrower parts, then (according to that authority) you must have all the necessary parts. It doesn’t always work the other way round. If you have all the necessary parts, there may be more optional parts that are needed; or indeed there may be some aspects of the broader ability that are not easy to represent as distinct narrower parts at all.

Obviously, the implications between a wider ability and its optional parts are less definite. The way that optional parts contribute towards the whole broader ability is something that may best be described in the description of the broader ability. OK, you may be tempted to write down some kind of formula, but do you really need to write a machine-readable formula, when it may not be so clear in reality what the optional parts are? My guess is, no. So stating the relationship in a long description would seem to me to work just fine.

Real examples of this kind of optionality are easy to find in course and qualification structures, but I can’t find good simple examples in real-life competence structures. In place of this, to give a flavour of an example, try the pizza making example I wrote about in post 13.

I might claim I can make pizza. That is a reasonable claim, but there are many options about what exactly it might entail. Someone might want to employ a pizza maker, and it will be entirely up to them what exactly they require — they may or may not accept a number of different options.

In the fictional BSHAPM pizza making framework, there is optionality in the sense that there are three different ways to prepare dough, two different ways to form the dough into the base, and three different ways of baking the pizza. Defining each of these as options still leaves it open how they are used. For example, it may be that the BSHAPM award a certificate for demonstrating just one of each set of options, but a diploma for demonstrating all of the options in each case. I could claim some or all of the options. An employer could well require some or all of the options.

In the end, marking parts as options in a framework does not limit how they can be used. You could still superimpose necessity and optionality on top of a framework that was constructed simply in terms of broader and narrower. What it does do is allow tools that use a framework to calculate when something deemed necessary has been missed out. But marking a part as necessary doesn’t mean that a training course, or an assessment, necessarily has to cover that part. The training or assessment can be deliberatly incomplete. Where optionality is really useful is in specifying job requirements, course and assessment coverage, and the abilities that a qualification signifies in general, leaving it to individual records to specify which options have been covered by a particular person, and leaving it to individual people to claim particular sets of detailed abilities.

Perhaps the argument concludes there: it is useful (I have argued) for people constructing competence structures to be able to indicate which parts are logically necessary and which parts are logically optional. Other tools and applications can build on that.

Does that make sense? Over to you, readers…

Meanwhile, next, I’ll write something about the logic of National Occupational Standards, because they are a very important source of existing structured competence-related definitions.