Back in the 1960s, management coach Martin M. Broadwell developed the Four Stages of Competence learning model to describe different levels of teaching. A decade later, Noel Burch of Gordon Training International used the model to create the “four stages for learning any new skill” to describe the various psychological stages we go through when learning.
These four stages are: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence.
Understanding the four stages that individuals go through when learning a new skill is essential for the success of any business and its employee learners.
For employee learners, this understanding can help them identify where they are in their learning journey, focus their learning efforts, set realistic goals, and develop a growth mindset that will help them learn, lead, and innovate.
For businesses, it helps Learning & Development (L&D) managers and HR teams identify areas where employees need support and development and create more effective training programmes.
Let’s look at each competency stage, what it means for the individual, why professional competence is vital in a business setting, and how to cultivate it in the workplace.
The Four Stages of Competence
1. Unconscious Incompetence
This is the “ignorant” stage where you “don’t know that you don’t know.” The learner or worker doesn’t know where their skill gaps are, nor that there is a way to close them. For example, a new employee may be unaware of their company’s project management tools and try to work without them, or blunder forward without asking for guidance. Or a senior manager could be (blissfully) unaware of their terrible communication skills. How long an individual stays in this stage depends on what encourages them to learn.
2. Conscious Incompetence
At this stage, you become aware of their skill or knowledge gaps and understand that you have to acquire new skills to close them. In other words, you “know that you don’t know” something. Making mistakes is integral to this phase of the learning process, as it enables you to learn from them. For example, a writer submits a piece to their editor, but the tone, style and format are wrong. The piece then comes back with comments and an example of what it should look like. When the writer begins to engage with the feedback and consciously correct their mistakes, that’s when learning begins.
3. Conscious Competence
This is when you know how to do something through conscious habit. Tasks have become instinctual and are second nature to you. However, it’s also knowing that continuing to perform the task well requires ongoing learning, practice, conscious thought and hard work. For example, an employee has learned everything there is about social media marketing, but still needs to focus on analysing results and creating engaging content to ensure they reach their goals. This is the stage where most of the work and growth happens.
4. Unconscious Competence
Known as the mastery stage, this is when you know how to do something through conscious involvement. You have enough experience to perform a task unconsciously, and what you do has become a part of your authentic self. Examples are typing, teaching, editing, practising manual dexterity tasks, or performing sports activities purely from “muscle memory”. It also applies to soft skills, such as active listening and communicating well. From here, learners and employees can push themselves to learn an entirely new skill or discover new fields of growth.
Why Competence Matters in the Workplace
Ideally, employers want all their employees to be in the third and fourth stages of competence. These are the sweet spots where individuals excel in their roles and contribute to their teams’ and organisations’ overall efficiency, productivity and success.
Individuals who have mastered — or almost mastered — their jobs are more engaged and happy at work, and when individuals perform their roles competently, they feel empowered and confident. This leads to a sense of accomplishment and motivates them to develop and improve their skills in areas aligned with their career goals.
Competent workers make great team players. They support each other, provide valuable insights, and achieve team goals much quicker. Organisations see increased productivity, higher quality of work, reduced risk, and higher customer satisfaction.
It’s a win-win all around.
Building Competence for Better Performance
Building professional competence in your workforce starts with conducting a company-wide skills gap analysis to see who needs upskilling and training in what area. Importantly, leaders and regular employees must commit to a culture of continuous learning and professional development to ensure learning momentum isn’t lost.
Modern eLearning management systems and up-to-date, off-the-shelf courses enable Learning & Development and HR professionals to easily create and deliver powerful blended, social, adaptive, and personalised learning experiences.
Adaptive learning is specifically relevant when building competence, as the four stages of competence are at the core of the algorithms used in adaptive learning technologies. By recognising at which stage a learner is for a particular topic, an adaptive learning platform can select specific content on that topic to help the learner reach the next stage. It can even use assessments to show learners where their skill gaps are, moving them from one stage to the next.
It also allows L&D and HR teams to customise the learning material to adapt to each employee’s learning style, which may be text-based, visual, audio, kinaesthetic, or a combination of these.
Another important part of climbing the competency ladder is giving learners the opportunity to practise and apply new skills as soon as they learn something new. By engaging employees in blended learning activities, micro-learning, collaborative sessions, problem-solving workshops, and social and peer learning, they get to test themselves while identifying and filling knowledge gaps.
Accountability and feedback are essential to ensure that learning is optimised and new knowledge can be applied when taking on new tasks. Mentors, feedback buddies and learning success coordinators should be available to provide guidance in between learning sessions to motivate learners to embrace challenges and not give up when they hit a stumbling block.
We’re Here To Help You Build Workforce Competence
New Leaf Technologies has its finger firmly on the pulse of the latest learning trends, from instructional design methods that encourage learners to explore ideas from multiple perspectives to AI-powered learning management systems that accelerate training and development across industries.
If you’re keen to move your employees from stage one on the competency ladder to stages three and four, get in touch, and let’s partner on a solution that best suits your workplace training and development needs.
