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How the library is built

The 80 job descriptions, the skills index and the skills matrix downloads all come from one set of 16 department frameworks. This page explains where that content comes from, how it is written and checked, and how to report a mistake.

What is in the library

Each department has five career levels, named with job titles people really use. Each level is a job description: the skills it needs and the rating it expects for each one. Some departments also list a certification, required from the level where it is usually expected.

There are 382 skills in total. 14 of them are shared skills, such as communication and problem solving, that every department is rated on. The rest belong to one department.

The rating scale

Every skill is rated on the same 5 steps: Novice, Basic, Proficient, Advanced, Expert. Each step has one short description of what a person at that step can do, written to the reader ("You can …").

A career level expects a step for each skill, or marks it "Not required". Expectations rise as you move up the levels and never drop from one level to the next. Not every skill reaches Expert at the top: some hands-on skills stop at Advanced, because a senior person owns that work through others.

Several of our sources describe skills in four levels, not five. There, we split the middle band in two: Proficient means you do the work on your own, and Advanced means you set the standard others follow.

In your own Competrace workspace, an admin can rename the steps and use between 5 and 10 of them.

Where the content comes from

Every sentence in the library was written for it. Where a department’s scope, skill list or style of writing comes from an openly licensed source, we name the source and its licence below.

We changed everything we adapted: it was rewritten for this library and its five-step scale. None of these organizations has reviewed or endorsed the library.

Written from scratch: business analysis, finance & accounting. No openly licensed framework exists for these, so every skill and description there is our own writing.

For most departments, no openly published career ladder exists. There, the level titles are real job titles, but their order is our own default, meant to be edited.

We do not copy text from books, blogs, vendor material, or frameworks whose licence does not allow reuse in a product. Certifications appear by their real names only; no course or exam text is used.

Required notices

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

The library includes information from the O*NET 31.0 Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA). Used under the CC BY 4.0 license. O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA. Competrace has modified all or some of this information. USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed, or tested these modifications.

Who writes and checks it

Competrace writes and maintains the library. It has not been reviewed by an outside expert.

Every rating description is written to the same rules: one thing a person can do, that someone else could observe, and a clear step up from the line below it.

On , a full check found that every skill had a description for all five steps, and that no expected rating dropped from one level to the next.

How often it changes

The library lives in our database, and every change to it is recorded. Each department page shows an “Updated” date. That date comes from the content itself, so it moves only when the content changes, not when the site is redeployed.

Past changes include wording fixes, US spelling throughout, rewriting the shared skills so they read naturally in any role, keeping one certification per discipline, and adding new departments.

The library last changed on .

Report a mistake

If a skill, level or description is wrong, out of date or unclear, email support@competrace.com with the page link and what should change.

A fix changes the library itself, so it shows on every page that uses that text, and the “Updated” date on those pages moves.