Recruitment and Educational Alignment Use Cases for Competency Frameworks

Competency frameworks describe the knowledge, skills, and behavior needed to perform in a given field or role. Organizations and individuals have numerous use cases for competency assessment. Post-secondary educational institutions and training providers also have use cases for industry- and discipline-specific competency frameworks. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has used competency frameworks for both organizational uses and individual assessment purposes. While these uses are briefly touched on, the focus of this paper is on use of competency frameworks for communicating employer needs to education providers for recruitment purposes and for aligning curricula to meet discipline-specific competency requirements. LANL’s approach to developing and managing competency frameworks for several types of technicians is described, as is the use case methodology.