Developing Competencies for Success

Competencies are the combination of knowledge, skills and abilities that contribute to individual and organizational performance. The APPEL developmental framework is based on a rigorous set of competencies that practitioners should have in order to perform their jobs. These competencies define the breadth and scope of the discipline and facilitate personnel development and assessment of individual knowledge and capabilities.

The NASA Systems Engineering competencies were derived from many sources, including extensive interviews with several hundred highly successful project managers and system engineers at NASA. The resulting competencies were vetted with both internal and external organizations to ensure completeness and accuracy. Since the competencies form the foundation of the development program, they are under configuration control and are reviewed and updated as appropriate.

A key step for NASA technical practitioners is to understand the requirements of their roles and the related competencies. APPEL seeks to help practitioners refine their competencies in order to reach the highest level of performance.

Performance-level descriptions for each competency have been created to guide the overall development of individuals within the program/project and engineering disciplines.
+View the Project Management and Systems Engineering (PM&SE) Competency Framework

To further support individuals as they work to identify their appropriate development activities, APPEL provides a Course Competency Matrix in the APPEL Course Catalog. This catalog can be used as a guide in the selection of courses based on competency development and individual learning needs. In addition to competencies, the Matrix includes other course elements that may be of interest to individuals considering attending a particular course. The table represents a snapshot of all APPEL courses, including the course duration, audience, and goal for each APPEL course.