From Awareness to Mastery: the four levels of a skill

Every skill on iCompetent has four levels: Awareness, Knowledge, Skill and Mastery. They describe how far a person has come, from knowing that something matters to being able to do it well and teach it.

Awareness and Knowledge come from courses

A course can teach you why a task matters, what the rules say and what the right steps are. When you finish a course or a program, the skills it covers are recorded on your profile at Awareness or Knowledge. You can see them under Skills from your courses on your own profile. Each skill's page lists the courses that lead to each level, under How to earn this skill.

Skill and Mastery are signed off at work

Knowing the steps is not the same as doing them safely on site. So the two higher levels come only from an assessor's sign-off. Organisations do this in their own workspace on corp.icompetent.com: an assessor watches the person do the work and records the result.

Why we keep them apart

A course score is honest, but it is not a workplace check. Keeping the two apart means a skill profile never claims more than it can prove. A manager can see at a glance which levels came from courses and which came from a sign-off.