The Developmental Role of Competence Assurance

Competence assurance (CA) is a process of ensuring that the workforce is able to carry out its work in a safe and competent manner. It can entail disruptive and expensive regular assessments of workers’ performance, require employers to ‘backfill’ positions during the process, and provide little obvious direct benefit for the business. It may not provide accurate assessment if workers are withdrawn from duties for assessment as their performance obviously cannot be the same as under working conditions. If workers are assessed in media res there are issues around the potential observer effect on assessment outcomes. Employers and workplace assessors need ways of assessing performance that accurately target what is of interest with minimum disruption and risk. However, we will argue that the CA process represents an opportunity lost in terms of workforce development, if what is of interest is narrowly defined as present job skills with little attention paid to workers’ competencies as a whole. The key theoretical issues to be addressed here relate to authenticity in assessment in workplace training and include consideration of how competence/competency is defined. We consider how to achieve authentic assessment in safety-critical workplace settings in a way that will allow for targeted workforce development in the future. A change away from current practices to portfolio-based and 360-degree assessment has the potential to describe more accurately where skills and deficits lie, help companies identify personnel with needed competencies and provide relevant support for their development within a chosen career path, and to help workers identify their skills and goals and how they may be pursued within the industry/company.