TABLE OF CONTENTS If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
Benjamin Franklin
Competency is defined as the key knowledge, skills, abilities, behaviours and other characteristics needed to perform specific tasks.
Six Sigma demands the empowerment of people in an organization. Empowerment is one thing. Making it work to achieve a given objective is another. Prior to the empowering of people in an organization, to perform any new task in a satisfactory manner, three necessary personal requisites need to be satisfied. We have to ensure that they acquire the appropriate knowledge, nurture the correct attitude and develop the necessary skills.
These three features were recognized some 50 years ago and gave rise to the development of a taxonomy of education, training and development objectives (Bloom, B. S., 1956). This taxonomy is the accepted standard for the establishing of training and development objectives. A taxonomy is simply 'a set of classifications which are ordered and arranged on the basis of a single principle or on the basis of a consistent set of principles'. Bloom, and his fellow committee members, decided that the taxonomy be split into three domains, the cognitive, the affective and the psychomotor.
The cognitive domain includes those objectives that deal with the recall or recognition of knowledge and the development of intellectual abilities and skill. Cognitive objectives range from simple recall of material learned to highly original and...
