Recording competence
Keep a record of your competence.
Keeping a record of your assessments will help you show increasing competence over time and provide a good record of your development. How you approach this will depend on what you are trying to achieve, who you will show it to and what tools are available to you. If possible we would always recommend that you use an employer’s system or an on-line tool such as IET Career Manager. Alternatively you can create a simple paper based system based on a grid or graph, which will effectively show your competence level and can be used to track progress over time.
You can include other information in your record, such as references to evidence. It may also be useful to map your desired level (if you have one) against your current level to identify the gaps that you need to work on. This will help you prioritise development and monitor your improvement. The example opposite shows how this might be done, and you can adapt this to meet your needs.
Each time you assess yourself you may wish to create a new sheet, as your previous assessments will build up to create an interesting picture of your increasing ability. Plotting a graph will also demonstrate this very well.
If you are gathering evidence of your competence, perhaps for a formal assessment, you may wish to reference the evidence on a summary sheet, while keeping the evidence in a portfolio or where it is normally stored. There is more information about gathering, storing and presenting evidence of competence in the PD-How To Do It Guide.
