Competencies

Competencies are the combinations of observable and measurable knowledge, skills, abilities (KSAs), and personal attributes that contribute to enhanced employee performance (in the workplace) or educational attainment (in education settings) and ultimately result in employee or student success. A competency can represent traits, learning objectives, learning outcomes, and other similar constructs that define performance, mastery, attainment, or capabilities.

Information-hungry organizations demand access to rich and actionable competency data.

The fundamental goal of the Competency and Skills System (CaSS) is to enable competency-based approaches to education, training, credentialing, and workforce development. CaSS does this by enabling competency statements and competency-related data to be exchanged and processed by end user applications in an interoperable way.

Competency statements are already widely used in many contexts such as job position descriptions, transcripts, résumés, and credentials. CaSS renders them in fine-grained detail and stores them in a machine-readable format. Competency-based systems in training, education, and HR use competencies to manage many aspects of an individual’s career and learning, yet the competencies and skills used by different systems are largely isolated from each other. As people move among organizations and systems, their learning and qualifications information stays behind and may not be expressed in ways that different systems can interpret. CaSS empowers organizations to understand and leverage their talent better, and gives people a more complete picture of their professional qualifications and opportunities.

CaSS makes it easy for organizations and individuals to document and share competencies. Using CaSS, diverse systems can reference and share information about the same competencies, learner data, and evidence associated with competency attainment.