Just don’t call me ‘competent’
Looking for a competent sales director? Wouldn’t you rather have an experienced one? Or successful? Or even well-qualified? Or is just about good enough good enough for you?
Looking for a competent page turner
Danish companies love the word competent. Problem is, it isn’t quite the heavy-weight champion of job ads that it might appear to be – and though it can mean ‘qualified for the job’ in certain contexts, it certainly doesn’t carry the weight of Danish ‘kompetent’.
Look up ‘competent’ in an English dictionary. The issues jump out at you straight away. It has two related, but conflicting, meanings. Dictionary.com shows:
- Having suitable or sufficient skill, knowledge or experience for some purpose
- 2. Adequate, but not exceptional.
So, competent means ‘suitable’ – a skills-set that’s a good fit. Nice. That sounds like just what I’m looking for in my sales director. But ‘sufficient’? Just about good enough to get by? Mmm, not so good…
The second definition, though, really starts to get to the heart of the problem. Adequate. Not very inspiring, is it? I wouldn’t recommend anyone build their job interview strategy on how adequate they are. Kicking off with, “I can guarantee adequate results” in a job interview for any managerial position would be as effective as breaking wind.
Saying “I’m competent,” isn’t quite as bad as saying “I’m adequate”, but it’s not much better. It sounds like you haven’t finished your sentence. And the interviewer would finish it for you: “…but nothing special/not very good/a bit slow on the uptake”. There’s no escaping it, to most people on the street, competent means ‘just about good enough’.
But there’s more.
The negative form of competent – incompetent – is used much more often than ‘competent’ in everyday speech. It’s commonly used to make complaints, especially about people’s work. Calling someone ‘competent’ conjures the shadow of its more popular, darker sibling. And never quite shakes it off.
August 14th, 2008 at 8:37 am
This is a good point, Chris. It seems to me that companies that use the word competent in a job ad are - unintentionally - displaying a lack of ambition. Competent has the sound of being okay, but not great. And that’s not what I look for in an employer. I want to be at a company that has high expectations of itself and its employees - one that will drive me to greater heights.
This also has wider connotations. Due to the Danish word ‘kompetent’, many Danish companies use competent or competencies when they write in English where an English company would be more likely to use skilled or skills. And the definition, for skill (this one is from http://www.askoxford.com) has a much more positive, stronger meaning:
• noun 1 the ability to do something well; expertise or dexterity. 2 a particular ability.
The difference between the word sufficient (in the definition of competent) and well (in the definition of skill) is huge.