What is Specific Knowledge

In a Basis HR professional ladder, Specific Knowledge is a measure of skill (capability) with some specific area.

Whereas Skills within a professional ladder are intentionally generic, specific knowledge allows ladder designers to provide detailed skill areas for which an employee may be assessed.

For example, a ladder for Systems Administrator might defined Change Management as a skill, while specific knowledge might be for Microsoft Servers. In this way, both generic and specific criteria may be measured.

Using Bloom's

When it came to defining ranks for Specific Knowledge, we wanted something to which the ranks could be anchored. In higher education, Bloom's Taxonomy has been used to classify learning objectives.

The cognitive domain defines six levels and we like to define seven ranks for professional ladder criteria. (Why? perhaps another in another post.)

Since the cognitive domain of Bloom's is about knowledge, we began exploring this as a possible lynch pin for Specific Knowledge within Basis HR.

In the end, we used the [Iowa State University][isu_blooms] Revised Bloom's Taxonomy as a guide, adding the learning rank at the bottom of the stack to match our preferred seven rankings:

  1. Learning: You are still learning about the knowledge area. You probably need to constantly refer to documentation or seek out someone with more expertise to answer questions and resolve issues.
  2. Remembering: You are remembering what you've learned, but probably need to frequently refer to the documentation or ask for expert help. Other keywords include recognizing, identifying, recalling, retrieving.
  3. Understanding: You can construct meaning from what you see or read. You often refer to the documentation or ask for expert help. Other keywords include: interpreting (clarifying, paraphrasing, representing, translating), exemplifying (illustrating, instantiating), classifying (categorizing, subsuming), summarizing (abstracting, generalizing), inferring (concluding, extrapolating, interpolating, predicting), comparing (contrasting, mapping, matching), explaining (constructing models).
  4. Applying: You are applying what you know on a regular basis, referring infrequently to documentation. You may still defer to expert advice, but this happens on an irregular basis. Other keywords include: executing (carrying out), implementing (using).
  5. Analyzing: You know how to break things down into constituent parts and determine how parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose. You rarely consult documentation and infrequently resort to expert advice. Other keywords include: differentiating (discriminating, distinguishing, focusing, selecting), organizing (finding, coherence, integrating, outlining, parsing, structuring), attributing (deconstructing).
  6. Evaluating: You know how to make judgments based on criteria, best practice or standards, and determine the relevance of results. You may still refer to documentation from time to time, but rarely require expert advice. Other keywords include: checking (coordinating, detecting, monitoring, testing), critiquing (judging).
  7. Creating: You know how to assemble elements together to form a coherent whole. You can write documentation from scratch. You rarely, if ever, require expert advice. You are the expert. Other keywords include: generating (hypothesizing), planning (designing), producing (construct).

These descriptions became the basis for our default ranks when a new Specific Knowledge area is defined in Basis HR.

Conclusion

Specific Knowledge is a way to add an extra dimension to assessment criteria that helps insure an employee has some particular skill that carries relevance to the position he or she fills.