Four Stages of Competence

What the Four Stages of Competence are

The Four Stages of Competence (مراحل الكفاءة الأربع) is a model that describes how a person progresses in learning a new skill through 4 stages, according to the person’s awareness of what he or she can and cannot do. The person starts from unconscious incompetence, passes through conscious incompetence and conscious competence, and ends at unconscious competence. It is also called the Conscious Competence Ladder. In circulation it is attributed to Noel Burch of Gordon Training International in the 1970s, but its origin is disputed among the sources, and the next section sets out the detail.

The model is a simplified teaching model for describing the state of a learner. It is not a test of an employee’s level, it does not report that following it speeds learning, and it is not a description of how employees are trained in the Kingdom.

Who the model belongs to, and why its origin is disputed

The secondary sources we consulted differ in who they credit, and we present what each says without settling the matter, because we did not see an original text of any of them:

• An earlier book. Wikipedia states that the four ideas appeared in a textbook of 1960 titled “Management of Training Programs”, by three professors at New York University.
• A 1969 article. Sources attribute to the management trainer Martin Broadwell an article of February that year in which he named the idea “four levels of teaching”. One source describes his use of it as a description of types of teacher and not a ladder that the learner climbs.
• A 1973 book. Paul Curtiss and Phillip Warren are said to have mentioned it in their book “The Dynamics of Life Skills Coaching” in 1973, four years after that.
• Burch and Gordon. The company employee Noel Burch is credited with using it in the 1970s under the heading “four stages for learning any new skill”, and this attribution is the most famous.
• A wrong attribution to Maslow. The same sources say that the model is sometimes attributed to Abraham Maslow, although it does not appear in his major works.

We searched Crossref for a text by Burch or Broadwell and found none.

What appeared are uses of the model and not its origins: the article by Harianto in the Inculco Journal of Christian Education, volume 1, issue 1, 2021, pages 45 to 52, whose title carries the name of Maslow in crediting the model; the article by Houldsworth, “Conscious Competence in Interprofessional Learning in Healthcare Education”, in MedEdPublish, volume 7, 2018, article 39; and the article by Taylor, “From unconscious incompetence to conscious competence: Learnings from a Legionella outbreak”, in Infection, Disease and Health, volume 21, issue 3, 2016, page 128. We did not see the text of any of them, and their existence does not settle where the model comes from.

The four stages

The summaries describe the stages by the awareness of the learner, and the Arabic wording is a choice of ours:

• Unconscious incompetence. The person cannot perform the skill and does not realise it, so sees no need to learn it.
• Conscious incompetence. The person realises that he or she cannot perform the skill and that it has value. The summaries describe this stage as the point of frustration and the start of real learning.
• Conscious competence. The person performs the skill correctly, but with visible concentration and mental effort, and has to think about every step.
• Unconscious competence. The person performs it with such facility that it becomes almost automatic, and, the summaries add, may find it hard to explain the steps to others.

Some presentations add a fifth stage after the fourth, concerned with reflecting on performance or with teaching others. The summaries differ over its name and content, so we do not count it as part of the model. It is noticeable in this order that the move from the first stage to the second happens when the person sees what he or she cannot do, and not through practice. That is our understanding of the structure of the model, and it is not text in a source.

How the model differs from nearby concepts

• Competencies. The set of knowledge, skills and behaviours that the holder of a job needs in order to perform it is detailed under competencies. The model does not decide which competence is required. It describes the awareness of a learner of his or her level in it.
• Skills gap. The difference between the skills held by the people of an organisation and the skills its work requires is treated in skills gap. A gap is measured between what exists and what is required, whereas the four stages describe the state of one person in front of one skill.
• The learning cycle. Learning from experience in 4 successive stages of experience, reflection, conceptualisation and experimentation is laid out in the Kolb experiential learning cycle. That is a cycle that repeats, and the ladder of competence describes a rise in awareness of one’s level. In our estimate the two names share the number 4 and nothing more.
• The ladder of mastery. A table that places employees in its rows and skills in its columns, with a degree of mastery defined in advance, is the concern of skills matrix. The degree of mastery in the matrix is a measure of performance, while the stages of competence describe a person’s awareness of his or her performance.
• Coaching. A time limited engagement between an employee and a coach in which the coach works by asking questions is described under coaching. One suggestion of ours is that a coach use the stages as a language for asking the employee where he or she stands, and it is not stated in a source.

How the stages look in one work skill

Take a hypothetical skill, conducting a structured interview, for a new employee in human resources, and describe the stages in situations of our own devising.

In the first, the employee believes that an interview is a friendly conversation for which goodwill toward the candidate is enough, so sees no need for standard questions. In the second, the employee sees a colleague comparing the answers of candidates with ease because they were asked the same questions, realises what was missed, and stumbles in wording questions.

In the third, the employee writes the questions before the interview and checks the sheet during it, and gets it right with visible effort. In the fourth, the employee conducts the interview with eyes on the answers and not on the sheet. This is an illustrative picture for teaching, and it records no events and no data.

A hypothetical example: reviewing the skill of writing performance comments

Take a hypothetical organisation that reviews one skill, writing performance comments, among 12 managers. The human resources officer placed each manager in a stage according to a review of what the manager had written: 3 in unconscious incompetence, 4 in conscious incompetence, 3 in conscious competence and 2 in unconscious competence. The total is 3 + 4 + 3 + 2 = 12. The shares are 3 ÷ 12 = 25%, 4 ÷ 12 = 33%, 3 ÷ 12 = 25% and 2 ÷ 12 = 17% approximately, and together they come to 100%.

The 12 managers were then asked to place themselves in the stages. No one placed himself or herself in the first stage, because a person who does not realise a shortcoming cannot describe it. Their answers were 0 in the first stage, 2 in the second, 6 in the third and 4 in the fourth, a total of 12. Those who placed themselves in the third and fourth stages number 6 + 4 = 10, and those the reviewer placed there number 3 + 2 = 5. The difference, 10 less 5, is 5 managers, which is 5 ÷ 12 = 42% approximately.

The figures are hypothetical and were set to illustrate. They do not represent an organisation or a study. The difference does not prove that all five are in the first stage, because some of them might be in the second stage while the reviewer is the strict one. It indicates only that self assessment alone is not enough for a matter of this kind, and in our view a review of the output of the work by another party adds what a direct question does not. The example is an exercise of ours, and the model does not offer this method of calculating differences.

The limits of the model

• An origin not settled. The attribution to Burch is the most famous and not the established one, and we saw that the sources differ.
• No empirical test that we know of. In the sources we reviewed, we found no study that we adopt that tests whether learners pass through these stages in this order.
• A simplified order. In our estimate, real learning does not always run in one line. A person who has mastered a skill returns to concentrating on its steps when a condition of the work changes.
• A stage that a question does not measure. A person in the first stage does not describe it by its definition, which is why a review from outside is needed.
• A particular skill and not a person. One person stands in different stages according to the skill, and to say that someone is in the third stage without naming the skill has no meaning.

How the model is misunderstood

• Using it to classify employees. It describes the state of a learner in front of a skill, and not the state of the employee as a whole.
• Imposing all the stages on everyone. For some skills the work is satisfied with the third stage, and reaching the fourth is not the aim of every skill. That is our reading and not text in the sources.
• Counting the second stage as failure. In the description of the summaries it is the beginning of learning, because the person now realises what is lacking.
• Attributing it to Maslow. The secondary sources themselves deny this attribution, as noted above.

The role of human resources

Human resources is in a position to use the stages as a language in a conversation with managers about one particular skill: who knows that he or she does not perform it well, who does not know, and what would show it to that person. It can also use the stages to read why a training programme aimed at people who do not see their shortcoming failed, before it proposes a new course. The decisions on training and assessment stay with whoever holds them in management, and human resources takes part in them through its knowledge of the skills required and of the methods of review.

What the sources allow us to say

We do not state that the model speeds learning or improves the results of training, or that an employee climbs its stages in a particular order. We did not read an original text by Burch or by Broadwell, and in the sources we reviewed we found no Saudi study that we adopt on the stages in Saudi organisations.

The better course is to treat the model as a language for describing the awareness of a learner of his or her level, and to judge any training programme by what appears in the work: whether the manager now writes comments clearly, and whether the manager now knows what is lacking. What is decided after that depends on the skill and on the nature of the job.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.