If you are thinking about professional registration, such as Chartered Engineer (CEng), Incorporated Engineer (IEng), Engineering Technician (EngTech) or indeed Chartered Scientist (CSci), Registered Scientist (RSci), Registered Science Technician (RSciTech), you’ll need to identify and explain how your skills and experience translates to a competence framework.
What is it?
So what is a competence framework? The awarding bodies who you can become professionally registered through, use these competence frameworks as a way to measure your skills and experience against the particular attributes required for the level of professional registration you are looking to pursue.
You can find the Engineer Council UK-SPEC framework here, and you can find the Science Council framework here.
The Engineering Council use these five areas of competence when verifying your application:
- A – Knowledge and understanding
- B – Design, development and solving engineering problems
- C – Responsibility, management and leadership
- D – Communication and interpersonal skills
- E – Professional commitment
The Science Council use these fives areas of competence when verifying your application:
- A – Application of knowledge & understanding
- B – Personal Responsibility
- C – Interpersonal Skills
- D – Professional Practice
- E – Professionalism
As you can see there are some areas of similarity between the two, essentially the competences being required are the same although they appear in difference places, for example D – Communication and Interpersonal Skills on the engineering specification encompasses the same sort of things that C – Interpersonal Skills on the science specification.
How it Applies
To see how the competence framework can help you, let’s look at an example from the Engineering UK-SPEC for CEng.
A. Knowledge and understanding – Chartered Engineers shall use a combination of general and specialist engineering knowledge and understanding to optimise the application of advanced and complex systems.
Each section may have subsections in this case, let’s look at A1.
Have maintained and extended a sound theoretical approach to enable them to develop their particular role
Okay, so what does this mean when you are trying to complete your application?
What is saying it is giving you a level of activity that displays you have conducted CPD (Continuing Professional Development) and also worked to extend your (engineering/technical) knowledge within your field.
So let’s say you’ve gone on a training course about “Linux System Administration on Red Hat” for example, this could be added as some evidence of you displaying this competence. Or let’s say you completed a Master’s degree in Production Engineering, again this displays you have been working to extend and improve your knowledge in your chosen field, and can display that through academic achievement (in this case).
Conclusion
As you can see the competence frameworks aren’t as intimidating as they might first appear, there’s lots there, but if you take it section by section, writing down some examples you can think of for each, you’ll soon begin to add in evidence and sources of evidence for your application.
A good way to do this is with a spreadsheet. Create a column with the competence on one column and then write some examples next to it in another column along with the job role you gained this particular attribute from. Doing this over a number of days or weeks to slowly build in evidence.
So now you can see how the competence frameworks can help in your application, why not give it a go? It can help in your CPD and working out where you want to go in your career next.
