The Four Stages of Competence
{Amy L.}
The Four Stages of Competence is a model that relates to the psychological states through the process of incompetence to competence when learning a skill. These are Unconscious Incompetence, Conscious Incompetence, Conscious Competence, and Unconscious Competence. These four stages were founded by Martin M. Broadwell in 1969 but were then later developed by Noel Burch, although many sources differ. The four stages help guide the reader to acknowledge what they don’t know, or what they know in certain cases.
The Four Stages of Competence do this in way of a comparison between what you think you know verses what you know. Using this contrast, the Four Stages of Competence allow the reader to be brought back onto reality and register their place in this journey for competence. The four stages emphasize the importance of being able to be receptive to feedback and how being narcissistic can delay one’s ability to thrive, to learn more. The definition of consciousness is the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world, and the definition of competence is the ability to do something successfully or efficiently.
The first stage is Unconscious Incompetence: You don’t know you don’t know. In this stage, people don’t know that there are things that they don’t know. For example, a child wanting to learn how to ride a bike after watching their sibling do it, but finding it as “useless”, because they haven’t realized the practicality of the expertise. This stage is of stubbornness when one cannot accept their flaws. An individual might often overlook imperfections and just focus on their talents. When said individual only focuses on their strengths, they forget that there is always room to grow, room to become a better person. We’ve all been at this stage one time in our lives, ignorant to people’s comments and remarks. We are simply unaware because we don’t know of the consequences of trying something new, therefore leading to the making of many mistakes. When people get mad at a certain individual for doing something wrong, said individual would brush it off because they cannot accept the fact that they are wrong. The time spent in this stage depends on the individual’s stimulus to learn.
The second stage is Conscious Incompetence: You know you don’t know. At this stage, one finally has realized that there is room to grow, that there are many, many wonders of the world that they don’t know about. This stage requires a familiarity with the skill. This is like the boy finally realizing that it could be beneficial to learn how to ride a bike and decides to try it out. Of course, nothing comes easy, and the boy falls off the bike realizing that he doesn’t know how to master the skill of riding a bicycle. The boy becomes determined to learn, because falling off the bike made him aware of his lack of knowledge, and it makes him uneasy. In this stage, mistakes are essential to the learning process. This is only the best-case scenario. In many cases, the boy might convince himself once again that the skill is unnecessary and never strive to learn. The boy could just be ignorant and think that riding a bike is too hard and waste of time. In that case, the boy did not pass on to the second stage, and therefore is still stuck in the first stage of learning.
The third stage is Conscious Competence: You know that you know. Once an individual reaches this stage, they start learning everything they can about what they don’t know. The boy starts training to master riding a bike. He starts small, first with training wheels and slowly, but surely starts acquiring the skill. The boy is now very confident about their capability to ride a bike and knows that he knows. He is now familiar with the many entails of the skill and makes only a small number of mistakes, although still requires a lot of conscious effort. Moving up to this stage can take many years depending on the knowledge one is trying to gain, because the more you know, the more you don’t know.
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