Career Stories & Articles

Part 1

One way of sorting through career challenges that has become popular in recent years involves focusing on competencies.  We’ll focus here and in two following parts of this article on how you can use competencies to make the moves you need over the years of your career.

Competencies defined  
A definition: competencies are the skills, knowledge or abilities that enable good performance in a particular role.  They may be learned in formal education (principles of physics or basic accounting theory, for example), or picked up working on the job (troubleshooting electrical circuits or using a word processing program).  Some competencies are clearly ones that are learnable (project management or C++ programming), while others can be developed but are related to your basic values or way of working (demonstrating customer focus, or striving for quality).

Competencies at NASA  
Here at the Goddard Space Flight Center, competencies have been used to profile roles within career fields.  As part of this ongoing project, career maps have been sketched out for such functions as Project Management, Financial Management and Resources,  and some Engineering areas.  While roles are still defined  by their outputs--what people doing the job are expected to produce, the role profiles emerging from the project also describe the roles using competencies.

For an example, visit the Flight Projects Directorate web site.

Competencies and career management  
Recall that in other parts of the website we’ve defined a “good career move” as being one that provides you more of what you’re looking for out of work.  We also said that Strategic Career Management involved making a good match of what you want and what the organization needs. 

Knowing your competencies can be helpful in two main ways.  First, think of the basic career management question “So, what do you want to do?”  We’re used to answering that question in terms of a job title, but it’s actually more helpful to answer by naming the competencies that you want to use.  Finding a job that fits your competencies is easier and more effective than thinking of a job that might fit and then trying to figure out if it would be satisfying.  If you know pretty clearly what you like doing and what you’re good at (in other words, the competencies you have and enjoy using), then it’s going to be easier to say what you want to do.  It will also help in reviewing NASA’s needs and determining where there’s a potential “strategic career management” match of your interests and abilities with the organization’s situation.

Competencies and career development  
The second big payoff from knowing your competencies lies in the area of career development.  The best way of developing your skills and capabilities lies in focusing clearly on competencies, and using them to create goals for skill growth.  They can drive Individual Development Planning, help in picking training and education, or suggest developmental activities.  Also, they can be of great value in forming long-term skill growth goals.

Next time  
In parts 2 and 3 of this article, we’ll look at a way of classifying competencies, and take a more in-depth look at how you can use them in career management and development.

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