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This article was written by Victoria Hill, Chemistry PhD student at the University of Sheffield.
Recently, EMBL-EBI, in collaboration with a number of our EU project partners, launched the Competency Hub. This is a free platform where students and professionals can evaluate their abilities against the competencies of that framework.
What is a competency?
A competency is an observable and measurable ability of any professional, specific to those required in your field. They’re further broken down into the Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudes (KSAs).
The competencies are all mapped to career profiles ranging from PhD student to senior roles, both in industry and academia, and assigned a grade on a scale that measures the level the individual should be at in that competency depending on the profile. For a more in-depth analysis, the user can go into each graded competency and look at which KSAs are applicable at that career stage.
What does the Competency Hub offer?
How did we do it?
After a pilot project with the BioExcel Knowledge Resource Centre, we decided to create a site where everybody can access all the information included in the competency framework.
The Competency Hub was developed by the EMBL-EBI Training and Web Development teams in dedicated two-week collaborative development sprints.
A goal was defined for each sprint; our most recent one focused on improving the career profile journeys. Previous sprints included making the site more user-friendly, adding learning pathway functionality, and adding career profiles, among other tasks to constantly improve the site.
What is next?
At the end of each sprint, we gain feedback from users to determine our next goals. The next sprint will focus on improving the connections between the competencies and the career profiles to the training resources.
Want to get involved with future development? Fill in our survey.