Competence means that you have the ability to do something well. You are capable of performing a task or job effectively. Competence can include the knowledge and skills needed to solve a quadratic equation. Or, it can comprise the much larger and more diverse clusters of skills, or competencies, needed to lead a multinational corporation.

The concept of competence is creeping into our lives, pervading our thinking about developing people of all ages – from new babes to weathered professionals. We find it in modern human resources departments in our workplace, and in innovating schools experimenting with competence-based education. Today, youth workers need to have key competences to deal with several issues.

But where is this concern with competence coming from? Is it the right way forward, or just another buzzword?

In fact, competence has been around for some time now. The roots of competence lie in a debate about general intelligence – IQ or g.

David McClelland of Harvard wrote a classic paper on the issue: Testing for Competence Rather than Intelligence. He published it in the journal American Psychologist in 1973. Forty years later, it’s still as punchy and pertinent as ever.

As you may understand the competence is the “ability to do something successfully or efficiently”. The term is often used interchangeably with the term ‘skill’, although they are not the same. Two elements differentiate competence from skill, and make competence more than skill. When one person is competent, they can apply what they know to do a specific task or solve a problem and they are able to transfer this ability between different situations.

In youth work, competence is understood as having three interlinked dimensions:

Knowledge: This dimension refers to all the themes and issues you know or need to know about to do your work. This is the ‘cognitive’ dimension of competence. It is commonly associated with the ‘head’.

Skills: This dimension refers to what you are able to do or what you need to be able to do to do your youth work. This is the ‘practical’ or skills dimension of competence. It is commonly associated with the ‘hands’.

Attitudes and values: This dimension of competence refers to the attitudes and values you need to espouse in order to do your work effectively. This dimension of competence is commonly associated with the ‘heart’.

This is the definition coming from the European institutions actively promoting youth work.

Let me provide a 8-module course, which will help youth workers to be much more skilled an knowledgeable about the key competences required in modern youth work!