Competency standards appear for good reasons – generally because there is a need to have a clear understanding on a minimum set of competencies to take certain roles, and to develop those competencies. This improves business results while increasing the efficiency of recruitment and the mobility of the workforce.
At the same time, while competency standards always stem from a changing landscape in the roles that are needed in organizations, they inevitably create institutions will, by their very nature, resist change.
An excellent example happened in the field of Project Management. It was quite a new discipline and a new role in the 1960s and 70s. At that time a formalization exercise began which created associations of practitioners (e.g. in the US, the Project Management Institute (PMI)), corpus of competencies (e.g. the PMBOK of the PMI), and on top a certification process (e.g. Project Management Professional).
Right now it is a standard, and the association of practitioners becomes defensive at the idea that it might need to evolve. As the standard becomes dominant in the market it tends to shut down competition. And organizations are now supposed to use a corpus that is a minimum standard across industries and by no means what is really needed in more complex or larger projects in a specific industry.
Professional bodies actually are part of these institutions prone to be put in question by the changes happening in the world. As they defend a profession and thus the livelihood of their members, they will certainly wage significant resistance of any change, and the older they are, the more entrenched they will become.
The number of these professional bodies increases regularly, and this leads to the question of how they will be put in question. Will a revolution be needed? Or will the amount of information available about people’s professional path and experience overwhelm the need to have clear cut professional certificates?
